Pontypool Changes Everything

That night I had terrible dreams I was killing people. When I awoke it took some serious self-examination to convince myself that I was not repressing real acts of murder. So completely vivid was my sense of guilt that I felt nothing short of running through a full account of my life could provide me with the peace of mind I needed to fall back asleep. In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn’t quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.

1 The Nervous Population

Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of Ontario’s thinnest winds. Cold as a needle and far too complicated to ever leave the ground, these picks of air snap at fetlocks, blackening the legs of horses. The anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears across the ice of a frozen pool. It feels the behaviour of more famous systems and is consumed by the complexity of its origins, breaking into mad daggers and splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze, skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their crazy minds and begin to make plans.

On the shore of the pool the other horses, ageing and brown, unglue their heels from the burning snow and align their bodies with the grain of the sun, counting the minutes, eight in all, until the first warming rays fall from the star’s coat and drape across a horse’s back, raising its withers and bathing its dark crest. The horses of leather and bone and cheek and thigh climb towards an open gate in the cedar fence that surrounds the pool. On the southern post claps the fat orange mitt of a man in a bulging white coat. In his other hand he swivels a bucket, clanging a metal dish against its sides.

The horses, five of them, roll in a line through the gate and are swallowed by the south shadow of the barn before they disappear into an open door. The man closes the gate and, swinging the bucket, follows a shallow gully of mud wending through the snow to a beige truck parked at the side of the road. He walks around the vehicle kicking the heavy ice that juts out, like teeth, from its underside until it loosens and falls, intact and old, onto the soft shoulders of the road. After circling the truck twice, swiping and kicking at random, he tries the tread of his boot in the access step and climbs into the driver’s seat.

Beside him on the passenger seat is a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its leather cover is striped with road salt, the tar spine is pot-holed. The inner lining and mulling have surfaced through ruptures. Books X and XI are marked by curled strips of pink paper that would open to the story of Orpheus. On these pages are scribbles and strokes caught in the fresh yellow paths of a highlighter, and in the margins illegible markings run the full length of page after page of the book. The man drops the bucket on the passenger floor, spraying a new chain of spots across the volume, which he turns over and presses for a second into the upholstery. He pops open the glove compartment with his huge orange thumb, lifts the book in the soft potato of his mitt and drops it on a stack of crisp white flyers.

Across the top of the flyers, in lettering flown with ears and arches, are the calligraphied words: “The Pontypool Players Present King Lear.” Beneath this: “directed by Les Reardon.” The opening performance is dated today. The man, who is in fact the same Les Reardon, claps the glove box three times until it closes. He removes his gloves and starts the truck. While he waits for it to warm up he turns on the radio.

If you’ve just tuned in we’re asking the question: Was it really our responsibility to feed the deer this winter? The problem is that the severity of the season has made food scarce. So a huge number of the deer population are not expected to survive. This huge population is a result of, is caused by, a previous government’s winter feeding program.

Les squints out through the salted windshield looking for rampant feeding programs. Or deer. He finds neither.

So what we’re asking today is this: Should we just put the whole business back in nature’s hands, or do we go on spending tax dollars to wreak ecological havoc just so a few shortsighted animal lovers can feel all warm and fuzzy? That’s the question. Hello caller. What do you make of this?

Les rotates the dome at the end of his turn signal. The switch sends a blue stream into the path of a wiper. He repeats this tiny twirl with his fingers, and he mimics the sounds made against the windshield by sucking his tongue through his lips.

I don’t think there’s any question. This is what nature wants. Let her trim the population.

OK. You don’t have a problem with preventable mass deaths?

It’s not the ones that die that are important, it’s the ones that live, the strong ones.

Survival of the fittest, eh?

You got it.

OK. Sounds good to me. Hello. Who am I speaking to?

Les rolls the window up until it seals. He breathes onto its surface, and in this opacity he draws with his finger a man in a hat. He puts a pipe in the man’s mouth, but it looks more like an oar, so he wipes the window clear with the mitt he lifts from his lap.

Peter. Listen, a living thing’s a living thing, and if we can save them we should.

But aren’t we just contributing to the problem?

No. We’re responsible for the problem, and our responsibility is to protect these herds.

Says who, Peter?

Me. I say so.

Well, if you say so Petey. Hello?

Hello. I just can’t stand to think of those poor animals starving in the cold, mothers with their little does shivering in the wind. I think it’s terrible. How much does it cost to feed them, anyway?

Well, actually, nothing, it’s always been a volunteer thing, but hey, that’s not the point. It’s not a matter of economics, it’s really a matter of what nature wants, and somehow I don’t think she spends a lot of time caring for a surplus of weakened animals at the expense of a healthy population.

2 A Healthy Population

Deep in the woods a female deer lies on her side as thirty baby deer slide easily from her birth canal on an immense sluice of effluence. As the moon appears above the trees its tidal effect on the afterbirth is visible. In the morning, children in full hockey gear skate across the purple and red ice, weaving around an obstacle course of tan corpses. Several of the deer stand frozen, and the children cut down all but two. They become the opposing nets of a makeshift hockey rink. A heart thawed over a small fire is used to draw the centre line and goal creases. A great deal of time is spent disembowelling the baby creatures so that their frozen feces can be used as pucks; however, having never eaten, their little bodies are as clean as packaged straws. The children settle for the mother’s hoof, which twists off easily.

As the sun climbs to a height that the clouds can’t reach, its rays smooth down the amniotic ice, turning it silver around children who slide out of control. The hockey players drift horizontally, like beads of mercury, losing the hoof, while they grab at the exposed backs of baby deer to keep themselves from being drawn along on their bellies toward some remote, invisible cliff.

Les pulls his truck onto the highway and, flicking off the radio, lifts a cell phone from his side to dial a number.

“Mary, howdy, Les here. Yeah, they’re good. Hey, what do you think of doing Ovid?”

Les makes a right up a long ice-covered driveway and stops halfway between the highway and a brick farmhouse that stands alone on a white hill in a field. Long rows of dark soil break intermittently through the snow.

“I know, but we could adapt them.”

Les reaches over and pops open the glove box and pulls out the book. Encircling the steering wheel with his arms, he turns to his marked pages. A powder of crystals swirls in through the driver’s window he’s cracked open again, glittering the book. Les tries to blow the pages clean but his warm breath melts the ice that sinks through the letters.

“A horror story? They want to do a horror story?”

Les tosses the book onto the dash and pulls off his toque, letting loose a six-inch whip of grey hair that he pulls back over the top of his balding head.

“I was thinking about Orpheus. Now that’s a horror story.”

Les stares out the side window while he listens, occasionally rolling his eyes, and at a distance he watches a man with a rifle emerge from the woods.

“Ed Gein? Now who the hell is Ed Gein?”

While Les listens to the story of how Ed Gein redecorated his farmhouse with body parts, he can’t shake the story’s dramaturgical inevitability as a home-shopping network sketch. Besides working for a livestock farmer, Les plans to direct the Campbellcroft High School yearly theatrical production. His ambition is to elevate a small troupe of drama students to a recognized regional company. He has printed flyers for productions of King Lear, Oedipus Rex, The Rez Sisters and Artichoke. Flyers that no one has ever seen. Les Reardon now believes that he is also destined to write the play he will direct. He wants to adapt the mythology of Orpheus into an outdoor spectacle — to include the music of the forest, the photosynthetic process, its colours and its honey and the trembling of stones, the abdomen of bees and the shadows of snakes. He wants to conjure an Orpheus, be possessed by him. And you know, Les thinks, people love outdoor theatre. Like in Toronto, the Shakespeare-in-the-park thing. I could have an annual Orphic festival. Except. Except now these kids want to do a serial killer. These kids think they discovered the low brow thrill allegory. So, it’s the Ed Gein Home Shopping Network-in-the-park.

“OK. Listen, if they wanna do this cannibal thing, God help us, I wanna write my Orpheus into it.”

Les grabs his Ovid by the spine, spilling several pages to the floor.

“Shit! OK. Listen, I can do it. It’ll work. It’ll be great. Look I gotta go. I got a hunter on my property, and I gotta chase him off. I’ll call you later.”

3 A Hunted Population

The hunter stops and turns towards the sound of the truck door slamming. The two men square off opposite each other, a full acre apart. As Les reaches behind to flip the door handle to check that it is locked, the hunter holds his rifle out from his waist, his hands gripping in formal distances from either end. Les recognizes this as a military move, a way to hold a rifle safely and run. In order to accentuate the joke being formed between them, Les begins to walk towards the man as casually as he can, stopping occasionally to cock his head and lift his hands in surrender. When they are within twenty metres of each other the hunter turns and starts lifting his knees in a strange slow run. Les raises his wind-chapped hands to his wind-chapped cheeks.

“Hey! Hey buddy, hang on there!”

Buddy manoeuvres evasively around a stack of cord-wood, successfully disappearing from the enemy’s sight. Les has grown annoyed, and as he reaches the spot where the hunter has disappeared he shouts, “Hey, asshole!” Three feet to his right the asshole crouches against the woodpile and kicks his feet out in order to roll onto his belly. He becomes tangled in the low boughs of a tree. Resorting to a clumsy series of civilian manoeuvres, the hunter, still on his side, slaps at the tree, which has snatched the barrel of his rifle.

Growing concerned for the safety of both man and conifer, Les approaches the battling pair with his hands out — hands that flit in a signal between harmlessness and helpfulness, careful not to trigger the wrong response in this man. With a final grunt and tug the man frees the weapon, driving its expensive butt directly into Les’s shoulder. Before the first impact has even had a chance to hurt, the weapon fires and kicks Les again. Spinning onto his back, Les feels his shoulder disappear into the ground. He reaches to see if it’s still there. It is. The pain surfaces out of the snow to find the shoulder. The brightness of this feeling springs through his body and sweat fills his boots. Les lies still for a moment, and he hears the hunter crashing through the forest. He sits up painfully and realizes that he is now seriously angry. You want an enemy? Les thinks, well, you’ve got one. And I’m gonna wrap that precious weapon of yours around your neck.

The anger arranges itself directly over the pain, and when Les stands he is already sprinting after the hunter. The path of the man’s escape is itself a spectacle. He’s not gone between trees but attempted to run through them. On their cracked branches hang, like Christmas decorations, little shreds of a camouflage snowsuit. At one point Les hops over the discarded knapsack of his quarry. Later, black latex goggles lay in the path, crumpled like S&M gear tossed off in a moment of passion; at some distance the rifle itself, pretty and scented with oil, reclines across a pillow of snow.

Les pauses here beside the rifle and thinks, coldly and soberly, I might kill this son of a bitch. Les lifts the rifle. The elegant black backsight rises up from the stock. Across the empty space over the barrel a thin line leads to the foresight at the weapon’s conclusion. Les lowers the rifle without checking the safety, and he strolls — dangerously, he knows — handling the weapon dangerously. He flips his frozen finger in and out of the trigger guard, the scent of it warming his hand.

He reaches a frozen stream where the hunter has obviously grown confused, his trail doubling back over itself, aborting directions. He’s lost. Stupid bugger. Scared stiff. Les lifts the rifle and turns the bolt handle, flipping the round out into the snow. He throws the safety on before cradling the gun over his shoulder. After spending several minutes tracing the meandering steps of the hunter he determines that he’s probably heading down the centre of the frozen river.

One hundred metres along Les discovers the hunter lying on his side, facing away. He grows alarmed and, moving closer to the figure on the ice, notices blood spreading out from its face. Leaning over the body he sees that, in fact, there is very little face left. By the aggression of the act and the senseless snatch of missing face, of missing life, Les knows that a human being has done this.

Has just done this.

4 Falling

The detective looks like a hockey player. He has a penalty box chin and eyes that recede way up into the cheap seats, the greys, faint in a mist beneath his heavy brow. His tie flips across his chest like a cat’s tail, alive, kinking against his knuckles for attention. The suit is not his preferred uniform, not the one he trains in. That one has action figure invisibility, so he ignores what he’s wearing, and the suit sails up over his shoes, gathers thickly in his armpits, and keeps rising north. He looks over at the man sitting across from him. Quiet. Patient. The detective thinks of himself as a people scientist. Les Reardon is a quiet, patient man.

Sitting in the little coatroom of a country church, surrounded by a dragon of wire coat hangers, Les Reardon has been shifting uncomfortably on a small wooden chair for two hours. Expecting to leave any second, he’s kept his coat on. Now that the detective has come in and sat down, Les regards the chain of hangers circling him as a lost opportunity. With his coat off he might have appeared cooperative, casual, at home in the investigation. Les puts his heavily padded elbows on his knees and twirls his cap in his hands. He feels restless. He wants to say something.

The detective continues writing in a folder. He’ll do this for five minutes. Testing his theory. Mr. Reardon is a quiet, patient man. Mr. Reardon works with someone else’s cows and horses. He’s a drama teacher. The detective likes men with decent effeminate professions. He looks up at Les to assess the femaleness of the man, to determine whether to contest it or flirt with him. The detective notices that his own handwriting is pioneering the interview, the dots are pecking impatiently on the outskirts of the “i”s, and a brusque circle around the date misses something crucial. The detective introduces himself.

“Mr. Reardon, I’m detective Peterson. How are you? I appreciate you co-operating.”

The detective attempts to untuck his sleeves at the elbow, but can’t.

“I guess what I need to hear from you is exactly what happened out there.”

Les tells his story. He remembers it as a western, a shootout, but he tells it as if he were a decent man, protecting his property. As he tells the story, “I found a wounded deer in the garage last year, so I have posted the property…” in Les’s head, or rather his imagination, a crazy bulb swings at the end of a cord, and the drama teacher stands in its green light, staring down the sights of a weapon. His grin hangs off the side of his face, a stirrup lost across the ankle of a boot. When he’s finished, the detective gauges the effect of the murder scene on Les. A drama coach, or whatever he is, he’s not so decent. He’s acting.

Let’s see a show.

“Awright, I have a dead man, and I have a man here, sitting across from me, who I found at the scene. You chased the victim into the dense brush, swinging his rifle at your side, and all of a sudden it’s a homicide scene. Now, what do I say? What do I do with your connection here?”

Les straightens the label on the inside of his cap. It curls back against his baby finger, a tighter furl for having been unwound.

“Uh. Detective, I didn’t shoot him. He wasn’t shot. He was… uh… he was…”

“Yeah, yeah, we don’t know what he was yet. Was there anybody else with you?”

“With me? No. Not with me. I didn’t see anybody else.”

“You live alone Mr. Reardon?”

“Yep.”

“Ever married?”

“Well, not quite.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I lived with a woman for four years.”

“Here in Pontypool?”

“No. In Toronto. In Parkdale.”

“Any children?”

“Yeah, uh… one.”

“How old?”

“One month.”

“Really. Daughter?”

“Son.”

“Awright, Mr. Reardon, we’re going to be in touch with you. So, make sure you stay available. If you should happen to remember anything, anything at all, call me at this number.”

The detective gives Les his card and leaves the coatroom door open as he goes. He turns down a hallway that he’s sure Les will not take when he leaves. Peterson leans his thighs against a radiator that runs the length of a wall underneath a basement window. He looks up at the parking lot that spreads out from his chin. A lone vehicle sits in the southwest corner. The truck is Les Reardon, remote, beige, built for leaving in. Closer to the detective is a pyramid of ice, jaundiced and sore with crystal pellets. This is the son. The detective looks for the baby’s mother. The small parking lot is bordered by a winter-toughened hedge. In its chipped line are rocks of ice. No mother. Beyond, the highway. Car-free. Further, the heavy trees and, not visible from this little window, a frozen river that has a crazy, pink spot in its eye. No mother. A month old. Jesus, what happened there?

Les stands four feet from his car with his arms stretched out and his knees bent. A warm wind arrives, just as he steps onto a large patch of ice. Now he hangs like a surfer against a blue screen — dipping and rising — not walking. Eventually he falls. In the middle of his wheel to the earth he doesn’t think of his son, he thinks of the infant’s mother. He remembers — when Helen’s blood sugar levels slipped off and she would seem to lose sight of everything and her hands made small, brittle help-me flights up to her face — how impossibly cold her lips became. He’d kiss them just to feel their cold, their distinct mark on his own melting mouth. He loved her then.

The ice slams against his temple. He holds his head in his hands as he lies there, pulling his knees up. Les is crying, and if he’s crying for anyone it’s himself, even though a tiny bug, in the centre of his brain, shaped like a baby, is crying as well. The baby’s crying. Les moves to the edge of the ice, and he presses the tips of his fingers over the frozen bubbles drawing himself forward. He manages to get to his feet and recovers quickly. He crawls the truck to the edge of the highway and pauses to join the traffic on the empty road.

Detective Peterson has his hand over his mouth, as much to stifle noise as to keep a piece of sandwich from flying loose. He’s just seen Les fall, and he’s laughing with his back to the wall. As his laughter hardens, he slides down onto the radiator. It will spread heat up through the seat of his pants, and he will have to jump forward, yelping. He will lose a little nugget of bread and fish while he spins around, palming the cheeks of his ass.

As funny as this is, and it’s probably funnier than it seems, it’s more. It’s what you get for laughing cruelly at the pain of others.

5 The Ed Gein Thing

Les is going to meet with Mary at the school. He wants to talk about the Ed Gein thing. As he drives he pictures his own revulsion at the children’s proposal. Mary’s considered it, accepted it. Les pictures higher and higher moments of fine discomfort. His Orpheus. Les looks out the window at the snow fields passing in long checkers of white and black. Out there. Out there is a killer for God’s sake. For a moment he includes his afternoon encounter with bloody death as just the very reason why Ed Gein is an inappropriate subject.

He looks forward to the centre line shooting its bars at the grill. Slow? Fast? What kind of a phrase is it?

Les adds up his argument for Ovid and against Ed Gein. Shape Shifter versus Killer. The former can also be the latter, but the latter can only destroy the former. Open. Closed. Dead. Alive. Good. Very bad. Except, he can’t quite hear the speech, something is holding it in front of the truck, not letting it in where it could be audible. Les looks out and watches a barn, black as the moon, and he knows why he has no speech. Because there really is a killer out there. I crossed paths with a predator today. Someone bloody. Out of control. In control? He’s out there. Now. He feels the tickle of fear grow. He pictures the rough hands of Ed Gein pounding the side of a horse.

“Hi Les.”

Mary is the principal of the school. Her background is military, and when the province attempted to redistribute talent outside the cities it met with a firmer resolve than its own in Mary. She is well liked, far friendlier, with more imagination and sanity than the young, unstable reformers so popularized by the government. At least that’s the local perception. She is a veteran of the tough decision, respectful of things beyond her control, with an angry, emotional bottom line. She detests the current government’s flippant emergencies. She is alarmed at the appearance of Les.

“Les, are you OK?”

She lowers Les into a chair in her office and he tells her his story. His back aches and his eyes water as he recounts the horror of what he’s seen. The scene has grown slightly bloodier now that it has taken possession of him, and he feels the bowling ball holes of the hunter’s eyes slipping behind his own sockets as he speaks. Looking down at his hands retracting between his knees, Les knows that he has changed. He feels that this person he’s becoming is not reliable, and of course he’s right. He’s attempting to absorb a great deal of unrelated material into a fairly primitive emotional machine. As the spinning blades descend into the febrile jar, what is going to be made of it all? An enlarged estranged lover, a son so new he’s still in orbit, a dead man’s cuttlefish face — and the cuttlefish himself, out there, scrubbing blood from his hands in the snow. He can’t help but make mistakes. I am at the centre of this. I am somehow made of this now. Ashamed, he confuses Mary’s hand on his shoulder with Helen’s.

Something she never did. She never let me soften. Not like Mary does.

He gives Mary a look so sodden with feeling that she turns away.

This man is in shock, Mary thinks, and she asks him to wait while she goes to get the nurse.

Shock has made Les dull. He looks automatically to his wristwatch, but is unable to distinguish the time as being any different from when he had sat waiting for the detective. He rocks the face between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the tightness of the band around his wrist. A swirl of fake snow, distributed up from the base of the watch, covers the front of a dark church, and falls again quickly, frosting the little plastic cemetery on its grounds. Les shakes his hand, stirring up the scene as he winds his watch. He peers at its face and this time he can see a tiny robot, clad in a torn hunting vest, mechanically dipping and lifting a shovel in the cemetery. Les scours the icy black forest behind the church, looking for the killer. It is no surprise, then, that he does not understand that there is more than one killer on the loose.

The first killer, whose work Les has already seen, is now burrowing his upper body in the snow, thrashing his open mouth against the frozen ground. He is soon going to die a death like no other. Another killer is brandishing the same open mouth at a nurse, not thirty metres from where Les now sits. This killer has the nurse’s lips in his mouth and, with enough power to break both their necks, he shakes her face until its muscles pop from their moorings. The nurse falls against the cabinet, just out of reach of Les’s wild sight, and slides onto the floor. The killer’s neck is broken and he stands over the nurse with his head dropping to his chest. His mouth is open, a bright red gasket through which the bleating of animals can be heard. The sound he makes isn’t human; the message, however, is unmistakable. He’s saying: This doesn’t work, I’m failing.

The killer flees up the hallway, led by his own open mouth. Distended by its searching, it now flails forward. When Mary arrives in the nurse’s room she stops at the door, going no further than the single bloody hand wrapped around the door frame. Murder scene, she thinks. Get Les, get out of the building.

She runs down the hall, back to her office. Les looks up, calm and blind. He makes a child’s resistant face when Mary drags him up by the arm. She doesn’t explain, leading him through the gymnasium toward a side door that exits onto the parking lot.

Mary pulls Les back, swinging his slightly stupid body behind her.

There he is.

The killer is sitting against the wall beside the door. He is rocking his upper body, his arms bowing at his sides. At their ends are upturned hands. Dead hands. Dead legs. His extremities, face, fingers and feet, are creased with jellied blood. Mary takes a step back, knocking into Les. He trips in a fall that brings Mary down with him. The killer is stirred and he sways his torso backward, turning his head to see them. Mary takes a four-legged step away. The killer tilts his body in her direction, as if he is part of her movement. Mary freezes, knowing that this man isn’t thinking, that he’s responding to his environment automatically. She sees his eyes. His eyes. Like split thumbs they rise in his sockets and turn in their glue of prehensile clots. Towards her. Looking. The thing coils slightly, and Mary knows exactly what it will do.

It jumps across the floor.

6 Things That Begin with “O”

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?”

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.

The bags of garbage held bodies, and the dogs in the street were licking the entrails of orphaned children caught in the crossfire. Next came the truly terrible morning, when Helen guessed, and he thought she was a spy. It was all so real. Even now, in the sometimes fragile, smart system of a new chemistry, Les is holding out until the day the war is acknowledged by Ontario and his wife is forced to return to him. A matter of national security. Their marriage, their son. He had become a drama teacher, and Helen left him, in the first month of her pregnancy, to live with a writer in the village of Parkdale. The post-breakdown Les asked far too many smart questions. He had begun to desire things that had never been discussed with Helen.

Les has never seen his son. He doesn’t even know his name. He’d moved to Pontypool, to work at the farm and the school, the summer before the boy was born. Les feels calm as he returns to the driver’s seat of his truck. The events of the day have guided him out of crisis, and he rolls the vehicle toward Caesarea, where he’ll telephone the OPP. He feels the safety and the sadness of this decision drop his gearshift from neutral to drive.

At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sit across from each other. Their mouths are opened and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point. Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane. This couple, unlike the Killings, will never act out the tiny story that brought them together. Instead, they are doomed to suspension, to act out a compulsion that has never been fully explained. But as Les Reardon steps up to their front door the compulsion will be given another opportunity to shock and revile.

No one answers the door, so Les pounds it harder, knocking it back under his knuckles. Les steps through the opening and immediately understands, by the choir of animal sounds coming from within, that the killer is here. How does he know? Who is this? Les steps backward outside, but too late. Two people in dressing gowns move into the hall like vampires and with surprising swiftness they stuff their hands across the frame just as Les slams the door. He looks down at the fingers he’s grinding. Wiggling zombie pawns. Sacrificed, they break and snap. The things are relentless, and as he repeatedly bangs the door on their hands they manage to stuff their arms through, up to their elbows. They will get through.

They are getting through. Les lets go of the door and tears down the driveway. The zombies grab at the flesh of his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Dozens of clumsy pincers spring him into the air. They are just below him, still pinching the ghost of his ass, but out of reach. Les has never flown before and when he notices that his feet are flailing at the tops of bushes he collapses. He waits for the shale to hit him, but it doesn’t, not until he drops through two feet of frigid water. Les looks up across a lake. The shore behind him holds the zombies at a distance of two metres. Les dunks his head below the surface. He removes his shoes and lays them side by side on the bottom of Lake Scugog. A layer of slush hangs just beneath the surface and it bites, cold, into Les’s ribs. Within seconds he feels his own death in this water. He sees a small boat down the shore at a dock and begins a mad dog paddle.

8 It’s Only to Be Expected

If his illness is acting up a little bit, it’s only to be expected. It does not really compromise his ability to discern much of his immediate physical dilemma. In fact, he dismisses the delusional worms gathering in each of the cottages he can see with far firmer resolve than any historically sane person could. The sky is harmlessly transformed into the underside of a table, and the clouds lengthen and thin into the wicked webs of spiders. The sun flattens and hardens into a round seal of pink gum pressed under a corner of the table. Les does not think that the menace his atmosphere represents is overstated, and he rightly thanks his illness for peeling back at least one layer from the hideous stop of the sky. Underwater he can hear the shuffle of feet beneath a table, the tapping of a signal, the little music of coins in a pocket. Since he feels he has the option, he rises from the water to Handel.

As he flops onto the dock, Les decides that, whatever it eventually means, for now at least he is a fugitive. Uncurling the rope holding the boat, he drifts in it, on a current that will take him to Port Perry. The sun is warm enough to break the ice in his veins into painful throbs. The card table has dissipated and a less likely blue sky has taken its place. Les lies in the bottom of the boat.

I have never been an organized man. I will never know what the inner life of other people is like. That can never matter again. In Port Perry I will steal a car. I’m going to Parkdale.

From the shore a loon offers Les both its name and its Haunting Cry. He turns his head in the bottom of the boat, bunching his cheek against aluminum rivets, and smiles.

None of you has anything for me anymore. I am Ed Gein. I want my wife and child.

At his nose is a dead worm, glossy and hard; it forms an almost audible S. Les flicks the brittle lower loop, creating a question mark. Stupid. He flicks the upper loop, creating a bar of worm that appears to have shot off its ends in a centrifugal action. Better. Better question.

For the next four hours Les lies freezing in the drifting boat, turning away from, and then back to, his worm. He pictures his son in little screens that open up in the aluminum just above the watermark. He names the child. He changes the name. The baby has a face like a walnut, a uniform surface of wrinkles, and Helen wipes yellow food from his chin. Les tilts his jaw toward the bait-littered bottom of the boat, and Helen reaches up and cleans three tiny crayfish legs from the side of his face. Her hand slips back beneath the brackish water an inch deep beneath Les. They live in an inch of water. No air. They can’t see. The fins of pickerel and the snouts of summer frogs hide the light. A rusted fish hook has just fallen in the baby’s food.

9 More Calming Effects

Detective Peterson pulls a rental car up into his driveway. He sits with his face in his hands. When he asks himself What’s happening? he’s not thinking of cannibal drama teachers and their flying passengers. Peterson is thinking about the difficulty he has had all afternoon. I can’t seem to speak properly. An understatement. I don’t feel any different. I can think clearly. At least I think I can.

He’s right. There is nothing detectably wrong with his thoughts; however, he has struggled all afternoon with a strange inability to control the words he uses. At the car-rental outlet the young attendee didn’t want to give him a vehicle. Peterson limited himself to single-word prompts: car, rent. But even these simple words betrayed him. He could find them but couldn’t repeat them easily — car, cove, tummy… It was only when Peterson showed his detective’s badge that the teenage boy proceeded, silently, suspiciously, to rent the car.

Peterson lays his hands on the dash and says, “Dash.” He grips the steering wheel with both hands and says, “Messy car.”

Messy car? Messy car? He looks at the steering wheel. The image of a car is on the horn bar. A sort of medallion of the rental place. Messy car? Is that it? The steering wheel is messy with a car? Peterson attempts to slide a key into this and says, “Bad boy Walt Whitman.” His heart sinks. Yes, he thinks clearly, there is a mess in the car. I just can’t say it.

Peterson steps from his car and carefully closes the door. The wet brown lawn runs down to the road. A crescent-shaped garden with rocks. Spring is coming. Today. The snow has melted since this morning. Peterson admires these things. Nothing resists him. He traces the perimeter of the garden with his eyes. Across. Long. Down. Up. These are lengths and directions. Peterson feels agitated. Angry. His house has something that he doesn’t. He looks at the front door. White metal, with a bronze knocker and a black knob. He says, “door.” In the upper left window he sees his wife pass. He thinks her.

In this simple word, spoken, though not aloud, he slips another key carefully into a lock. He turns it, gently. Her. The lock clicks and he applies a light pressure. Her fault. Aloud: “Her fault.” He stands in the hallway at the base of the stairs, armed with his first complicated phrase of this long afternoon, and he removes his coat. Out of the corner of his eye he catches himself in the hallway mirror. He feels encouraged by the image — a man opening a closet door, a gun belt slung across his back — a complex person, integrated by his own actions into a complicated world. This appears even more obvious by the controlled way he removes the gun belt and hangs it on an ornate hook beside the closet door. He turns and looks at himself directly. He watches his mouth and thinks: Her fault. Closed mouth. Her coat — mouth open. Closed — fault. Open — fault.

Ellen Peterson lowers herself onto the couch in the TV room. The television is off and a macramé throw hangs in front of the screen. She sets a mug of coffee onto a table beside the couch.

Ellen Peterson is forty-two years old, tall, with handsome short grey hair. Her eyebrows are rigged to set off her expression with irony, and her mouth operates with the quick lips of a young person. Her hands are hinged with a loose agility, their gestures can accommodate the approximate and the exact. In short, Ellen’s anatomy is a perfect compliment to intelligence.

She raises the cup to her mouth but stops halfway. The gesture is not surprising, an index of intellectual life: her face twitches once to release the pause, and she brings the mug to her lips. She pushes the rim with her tongue, breaching the sipping seal, and coffee flows across her chin. It turns in a black braid down her neck and fans out through the fabric of her red T-shirt. Ellen Peterson is the reeve for Pontypool, Bewdley and Caesarea. She married Detective Peterson twelve years ago when he was just an OPP officer and she was a real estate agent. She managed to become successfully elected reeve because of her passion and familiarity with the rural life of the area. Ellen has never lived in a city, and her sophistication and intelligence are considered by her constituents to be the best of their own. She has pioneered a sensibility for rural Ontario that will carry it into the next millennium with as much wit and ability as her urban counterparts. And what’s more, she will bring the mystery of the backroads to sluggish minds in boardrooms. Ellen Peterson is also a member of a local sisterhood of Wicca, and the Bewdley Seers’ Festival is a project that she lovingly organizes, with some anonymity, at a careful distance from the office she holds. This past year of Ellen’s life, however, has been shot with a tragedy of devastating proportion.

On May 19, 1995, Ellen Peterson was attempting to intervene in what she perceived was a rash seizure of property by the game warden. The warden had stumbled on a family of four standing nearly waist deep in a small river-fed pond. The family were slapping the water with surveyor’s stakes as they ran back and forth, falling and squealing. As he got closer the game warden realized that they were playing a sort of British Bulldog with a school of carp. When the family saw the man they rushed back up to shore, more embarrassed and excited than aware that they were doing anything wrong. None of the carp was harmed, and in fact many of them left the game to mate upstream with renewed vigour.

Ellen didn’t see any harm in what they were doing, but the warden tried to describe the removal of surveyor’s stakes as vandalism, or at least as an illegal use of spears. He wanted to seize the family home and prosecute to the full extent of the law. Ellen recognized a man whose heart, unlike her husband’s, would beat faster if only the world were just a little more crooked than it already is.

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.

She now studies future images in the afternoon, before the sun abandons her to suicide, and she translates them, using another set of machines sealed between the halves of an adjacent seed. Many of the images depict scenes of murder, but Ellen knows they only shock her to get her attention.

Occasionally, however, she will open a seal and a brief piece of song or snippet of conversation will make her laugh at some discrepancy. This is the mischief of her seals and machines.

10 A Bull Market

Ellen bites the tip of her tongue to squeeze the coffee from it and she tastes blood the moment she drops her mug. The sound of the mug as it spins and stops, hitting the leg of the table, causes her to cry. She bunches up the cold wet of her shirt and pushes her fists into her mouth. She clenches her eyes shut, feeling the blankness of the event scare her, and she hears the voice of a little girl in her mouth.

Detective Peterson hears his wife’s strange sobs and he pounds up the stairs, remembering as he gets to the top: Don’t make a big deal of this, don’t make a big deal of this. When he reaches the television room Ellen is holding herself tightly, straining to keep the voice from her throat. The detective slips in beside her and gently loosens the knot of her arms. He guides her head onto his shoulder and encourages her to cry. She does, and it’s the cry of a grown woman, full of softness for the little girl who is so scared. While he rocks his wife Detective Peterson realizes, without guilt, that none of this is Ellen’s fault. He says, “Is banned, in cape.” She looks up, grateful for the words; restored, she feels his affection diminish the barrier. The detective has failed to notice that he did not, in fact, say the words It’s OK, it’s OK. Rather, he felt their effect on Ellen. At this point he feels ashamed, knowing how wrong he was to have blamed her. Detective Peterson scoops up the mug and asks Ellen if she wants another and she explains to him that she’s already had two cups and maybe better not. He kisses her cheek and leaves the room, turning back as he steps into the hallway to ask if she wants to watch television with him later. She says that she would. It has been so long. Television has been a source of great anguish to her, but maybe now, with her husband sitting beside her, it would be like it was. Detective Peterson walks into the kitchen just as the phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Detective?”

“Yes?”

“We need a report on what happened this afternoon. The sargent has called in the RCs on this one. They think we got more than one killer. We gotta find Les Reardon.”

“Purse snatch… purse snatch… fucker…”

Peterson lowers the phone and feels a wind across his face. Bits of words catch in the sunlight across the top of the stove like barbs off a wire. He swings the receiver through them and they part in eddies around his wrist. He brings the phone back up to his ear.

“What? Detective Peterson, are you there? Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Yeah, sir, what did you say?”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“Say?”

“Yeah, what did you say?”

“Say?”

“Are you OK, sir?”

“Is barn, is messy.”

“I think I’ll come out there, sir, if that’s all right. I gotta couple of things to do first, but I think I’ll come out there. Is that all right, sir?”

Peterson thinks, Well, there isn’t anything wrong. I’m fine for fuck’s sake, I just can’t seem to say so. And he says: “Dirty dump… dirty day.”

“Uh… detective, we have a very serious situation unfolding in the region and if you don’t think you can… uh… handle it right now… I have to tell somebody.”

“Dirty, dirty, dirty.”

Peterson places the phone back in its cradle. He hears his wife call his name and he jumps. A flash of rage fills his chest. He runs into the living room and snatches the TV Guide before dashing up the stairs. By the time he reaches the top he calms again. He hears Ellen singing softly to herself. The song is very familiar. He can’t name it. As he enters the television room and lays the TV Guide in her lap he asks her what the song is. She tells him and he smiles, remembering its source. He hums a bar as he flips the macramé throw over the top of the television screen. Ellen suggests a television show and the detective pretends to consider it — he’s going to watch whatever she wants, and eventually smiles at her choice. The television pops on and the Rembrandt hues of a soap opera appear. This is the program they had decided on, and as they settle in each other’s arms to begin watching it they both feel an identical discomfort. Without discussing it Ellen switches the channel until she finds something. It happens to be exactly what the detective would have chosen.

Night Court. A rerun.

As Bull looks for a place to hide a mop, the Petersons nod to the closet that waits off camera.

11 Nadia Comaneci

The moon breaks into little pieces and sprinkles itself as confetti onto the front lawn of the Peterson household. A man in uniform steps up to the front door. He lays the back of his hand flat across the doorbell and by sinking his second knuckle he depresses the button.

Inside the house, up the flight of stairs that the front door opens to, is the television room. Detective Peterson sits up on the edge of the couch, straightening his arms to his knees. His head turns in the direction of the door. His eyes are new. Near him a wounded caribou pulls at a leg wedged in ice. Ellen looks to him, in the way she has had to these last few months, and when the bell rings a second time he turns on her, clasping one hand around her face and the other across the back of her neck. He attempts to shush her, but his teeth are too wet and his bottom lip is too sloppy.

The Honeymoon in Aphasia is over.

Detective Peterson’s difficulties speaking have spread out to his face, and now, in his panic, he feels that he must escape through the only door left open: his own mouth.

Ellen scrambles to resurrect the barrier between them — He is sick, really sick — and she rolls her tomato backwards from the corner of her mouth, subtracting the afternoon. Something is wrong with my husband. He’s holding my head like a newspaper. The detective drops Ellen’s head from his hands, giving her neck an assaultive twist, and he leaps from the couch. He pulls a painting off the wall and throws it across the television. Ellen has a sudden impatience with her own disorder and she belts her better self into action. She rises off the couch. He’s willing to break his own neck to stop me. She pushes her husband back against the wall and runs up the hall and down the stairs.

Before she can reach the bottom her husband’s body rolls against the backs of her legs. She knows the level this has reached. So fast. He’s going to break his neck to stop me. Ellen sweeps aside her disability with a flat hand on her husband’s back and she vaults over his pommel horse body. The detective spins and swipes at her ankle before she reaches the door.

The man on the other side enters the scene by slamming his body against the barrier. Ellen has rolled out of the way and the new man in her life is wrapped around the old one. The uniform pulls his head back to take in what he holds in his arms. No time. A hot mouth clamps onto his lips and sinks its teeth to close them. The uniform feels the power of an industrial press punching into the centre of his face.

Ellen scuttles backwards down the hall, and as her husband flicks his head she hears the snap of both men’s necks breaking. The detective drops the body to the ground and he turns his damaged upper torso toward Ellen. His mouth is full and he releases the contents down his shirt, hissing across bloody teeth. His bottom lip jumps up to make a consonant but falls short and swings slack across his chin. He sways his head, grinding the break in his neck. Ellen thinks she sees a wolf appear in shadow across the back of his throat and she fires at the blue moon of his uvula.

The already taxed anatomy of the detective surrenders utterly to the bullet and his head lifts from his shoulders; clear of them, it flips like a coin. The head drops to the floor, sitting against the door on the empty sock of its neck, and looks directly at Ellen. The look, though inanimate, is fresh with the experience of abjection, of failure. This look, familiar to the followers of zombies, is not entirely new to Ellen either. And if she weren’t so tightly packaged with terror she would, probably, cry.

12 Fish and Boy

The long pier in Port Perry floats its spine out into Lake Scugog, and among its ribs bob long sanitary sailboats with their own spare and polished spines. Seagulls lead each other’s capes in and off the tips of these skeletons, keeping the temperature just past winter with their cries. A great deal of soap floats in white castles out from the orange waterlines of the boats and they repel the surface slicks of gasoline like poles meeting. A boy wearing an outsized captain’s hat that loops off his head sits on the edge of a boat watching the patterns of gasoline as they leap clear on the smooth woven surface of the water. A giant goldfish, in fat flames, appears below. The boy catches his breath. The carp is almost as big as he is. The two creatures hang in the air marvelling at their equal volume, sharing the suspension, the yellow light of gills and the white ring of an ankle. The carp leans off the surface and carries its glow to the bottom, disappearing from the boy, who looks up at the seagulls that have brought their paper flight to within feet of him. He thinks that if clouds could shit they’d shit seagulls. He notices an empty boat floating close to shore across the harbour.

Les Reardon opens his eyes and watches a seagull at his feet tearing through the back of a perch. He slams the side of the boat with his foot, but the seagull doesn’t move. He flaps both his legs apart, hitting the sides, and this time the bird jumps into the air. It rises a foot or two and then returns inverted, standing this time with the tip of its beak through the forehead of the fish. Les leaps up and, missing the bird, squishes the desiccated fish in his hands, sending it in a slurp up into the air and overboard. The seagull hangs above his head, screaming, and finally lifts backward.

On shore Les discovers he has difficulty walking. He steps around sloppily on guitar-shaped legs until a succession of steps brings him out of the sand and onto a brown lawn. An elderly woman, in a purple silk bathrobe, is standing on the clean bare floor of a bare room that looks out at the lake through a tall window. She watches the man who has just appeared in her backyard. He appears drunk. Filthy. She slides the door open a few inches, sniffing at the outside before speaking.

“Hello there. Can I help you?”

Les waves at her as he steps forward. He approaches the woman deceitfully. She only has time to say “Oh my!” before he knocks her to the floor. A little bald man in pyjamas appears squinting at the bar in the corner of the room, and he takes three quick steps toward his fallen wife. He is also knocked over by Les.

This couple distinguish themselves from the Killings by being the Knockouts.

13 Cholera

Les pulls over in the little grey car he stole from the Knockouts. He steps out to fill it with gas. As the numbers are flying through their eleventh dollar an attendant lurches from his booth. Les recognizes him. Zombie. Les massages the trigger of the nozzle with his finger, recognizing the weapon. Gun. The zombie attendant stops within two metres of Les and is confused. Its circular mouth rotates a few degrees and clicks into a new position, tightening an aperture of skin along its rim. The zombie may or may not be preparing to attack. Les flips the nozzle from the side of the car and in two sprinted steps he drives the hooked tube down the attendant’s throat. He pulls the trigger, jetting gasoline into the zombie’s stomach — its lizard — instantly killing the organ. The pump clicks off automatically as the fluid washes back into the zombie’s mouth. Les steps up onto the low concrete island, tossing the hose against its recoil wire, toward the creature that has collapsed. Unable to close its mouth, it cacks from the back of its throat and lays its upturned hands in the crude water that it has released onto the ground. It looks down into the dark pool growing around its hips and sees the red lights of the car reflected there. As Les pulls away from the island the zombie turns its hand over on the surface of its fecal blood, caging the car too late. The silver bumper drifts to the edge, disappearing into the gravel.

Les leaves Manchester with nearly half a tank of gas and he makes his way south through wicked Canada. He has isolated a part of himself that he commits to sanity, and from here he has decided that the difference between his relapsed psyche and the outside world is so negligible that to worry about losing touch is not the most urgent game. In fact, Les is sure that the behaviour of the world is somehow blueprinted by his paranoia. This is not a new delusion, he realizes; and it’s a delusion with more benefits than liabilities. Les knows that the balance does expire, and he prays that the world will one day be worthy of a new prescription, another antipsychotic medication. But for now the difference is both negligible and essential. Les lets his contaminated body drive while he watches the shadows of barns for any signs of Helen.

In the years prior to his breakdown, actually since childhood, Les knew that a terrible thing was waiting for him. He detected it first in adults. He remembers clearly watching their panicky faces, their overwhelmed expressions, and thinking that they were all so frightened. He watched the adult world battle against his awareness, deny it, and react angrily if he acknowledged it in any way. In fact, as he grew older and the disastrous world grew closer, he decided that he would never act out the tiny little cartoon of adult exhaustion. He would live in ruin if he had to, but he would never pretend that his every living moment wasn’t heading in a painfully wrong direction — and one day, when the entire human race is seized with the first pangs of consciousness, it would look to him who had suffered.

Throughout school Les struggled to hide his disorganized inner world and its hot painful cuts, and he survived, barely, giving his teachers and parents a rough facsimile of what they wanted. It would take years before these people would finally give up on him, and when they did Les felt a great relief. The first thing he did, as a relieved person, was get his trucking licence, and soon, after landing a good-paying, secure job with the city, he began to haul its garbage in the very early morning.

Les enjoyed his job so much that he began to mythologize it. That was when the war in Ontario began. At first he was surprised at what was happening. The body bags hidden in people’s garbage shocked and frightened him. He checked newspapers for anything on missing people, but he found only stories about other wars: race wars, drug wars, the war on poverty.

The adult world squirmed closer to him. Not knowing yet; not reporting. Les started to notice that the body bags sometimes weren’t sealed and a pale yellow arm or leg would arch across the gutter.

Then one day he watched a co-worker through his side-view mirror. Stepping off the back of the truck and swinging down to scoop up the bags, the worker rolled, with the side of his boot, the tiny round corpse of an infant back into an open garbage bag. This was the turning point. Les knew that he had been wrong all his life. Not only did people know about the panic that scratched their world, they had been secretly coordinating, conspiring with it. An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada’s Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children’s kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder.

Les turned the truck around, leaving the worker, bag in hand, calling from the curb. This was the day of his breakdown. He was taken directly to the Clark Institute. After a month that he can barely recall he entered the strange tent city of the ICU. He wandered alone, silent, among the shrouded beds, occasionally stepping out onto an impossible acreage of tile that restrained patients with its emptiness. Tall windows held back an aquarium of nurses and doctors who swam around each other in turquoise water, feeding on plants and communicating through unstable bubbles that burst across their cheeks. Les felt nothing in these weeks. No one spoke to him.

He was eventually moved, through the aquarium, into a proper room with a proper roommate.

When Helen visited him the first time a thousand emotions sprang to life in his chest, and with each visit these emotions, unnamable and new, began to crawl to a surface. When the doctors spoke to him Les described the War in Ontario as the twisted invention of a paranoid mind, which, more than being precisely what they wanted to hear, Les knew was true. The Underground didn’t exist. He told the doctors this. He told the doctors less of what he actually believed. Les believed that the War was merely a bad interpretation made in a diseased body. Yes, but what was it actually an interpretation of? Les vowed to himself that he would do exactly what they told him. He would devote himself to becoming stable and sound so that he could be a more reliable interpreter. He hid from them this fact: that the War would always be for him a sign of what it could never express. He also devoted all of his new emotions to Helen.

These emotions, brilliant and strange as they -were, were also very painful. They collected themselves — safety in numbers — around the finger that Les pointed at his girlfriend. They all became love. When Les returned home, Helen had the disturbing sense that in the bright light of his new devotion she had somehow lost her substance. For Les, Helen had never had more substance. She existed as the luminous form of an entire emotional spectrum.

And then, as she was about to enter the second month of her first pregnancy, she left him.

14 Getaway Cars

The first car dealerships of Brooklyn start to appear. Les scans the swooping parking lots, trimmed by drying lightbulbs and coloured flags, for zombies. A man standing at the side of the road balances two heavy plastic bags. He watches the car approach and he steps out onto the road precisely as it passes him. Les looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the man step across the centreline. Some are not zombies. He slows the car, wondering if he shouldn’t grab this opportunity to talk to an uncontaminated person. He remembers the Knockouts. Opportunity. I’m contaminated.

Brooklyn soon disappears with the same chrome mirage that brought it into view. Past Green River, the drive will begin to congest into suburban corridors — corridors that drop, like champagne dribbling from glass to glass down a pyramid, into Parkdale. Helen. Traffic lights change the relationships between cars and Les waits anxiously at each red, not looking at the vehicles beside him that have become carriers, little Trojan horses, breachable barriers.

As he descends down Dufferin Street, toward Parkdale, Les turns his hands inward around the steering wheel, sliding its grips deep into his palms. He’s braver. The miracle of his thinking is refreshed. He can distinguish between his strategies and his delusions. Negligible difference. Essential. The child in the back window of the car ahead is not a weapon of war, but he bears the mark; his parents, though, might just be slack-jawed cannibals looking for a parking lot to pull over in so that they can twist off his little blond head and share his face.

That’s possible.

Les feels the galvanizing effect of knowing the difference. The mad patterns and buzzing geometry sneaking over him are protective prisms of light, deflecting poisons, redirecting unexplained intrusions. The zombies, on the other hand, are as immediate as hornets. Les flips down the sun visor, where he had earlier stashed Helen’s address, and pulls the piece of paper from behind an elastic band. He unfolds the page across the steering wheel. Number 3, Temple Avenue. Helen and our son.

And some cocksucking writer.

At King and Dufferin Les pulls into the McDonald’s parking lot. He watches panhandlers mill around in front of the Hasty Market. A young woman steps out of Money Mart. A tall, thin man in a fat man’s suit pushes off from the golden arch he had been leaning on and walks toward the grey Datsun. Les examines the face closely. A gaunt, black face. Startled eyes. A slightly open mouth. He lifts a cigarette to his lips and fingers that are medicated scissors, broken and soft, flatten across his mouth, sloppily reinforcing the seal, which is never made. The man inhales and exhales through his teeth. Les sees a keener man in the sharp corners of his eyes, a man who has paid close attention to the way people watch him shuffle. He has taken great care that the shuffle be guided intelligently. Not a zombie.

Les leans into the passenger seat and waves his hand through the window. The panhandler begins talking anyway, making a face, “Yes, I know, but we need to talk.” And for a second, Les falls for the solicitation. The man accidentally slips, losing his target, and Les repeats the hand wave, this time cutting it short, stopping the panhandler in his tracks. Les looks up and the panhandler has already hopped up the step in front of the Money Mart. Les gets out of the car and a loud roar rumbles up his legs. He looks over his shoulder as a military truck moves along King Street and turns down Spencer Avenue. Another follows. The panhandlers don’t look. Across the street a table of cowboys with long grey hair lean over their early morning drafts and watch the small convoy. One of them, cool looking in mirror shades and white mustache, interprets the scene for his friends. Les and the man lock eyes and they share a reptile’s wink across a common lateral lid. Les feels the tiny pop of disconnection as he breaks eye contact. Not a zombie. Who will be the first?

Les’s question is answered almost immediately. A loud squawk comes from the laundromat across the street. A man’s jean jacket falls open across a red T-shirt. He kicks his white cowboy boots back into a washer as he is pushed backwards up and onto it. Another man in an undershirt wiggles with a ferret’s body onto the chest of the cowboy. He sits up, a tattooed incubus, and when he turns to look through the window Les sees a familiar face. His eyes poke out through the chipped blue “a” of “Laundry,” and his pupils, like hard clots, shake once across Les’s car. Behind the lower curve of the “a,” a bleached tongue licks the space inside a blood-rimmed wheel. Les starts the car and pulls past the laundromat. Everyone at the intersection, including the panhandlers, is watching a storefront puppet show in which men act like pit bulls. Joined at the mouth, they break each other’s necks.

As he turns the car down Spencer, Les feels each house pass. They’re being subtracted from the distance between him and Helen.

Temple Avenue.

He is unable to turn on Temple. Four large trucks surrounded by military personnel block his access. He parks the car illegally on Spencer, at a fire hydrant just before Springhurst. It’s now or never. Les goes through backyards, scaling fences until he has counted from the number 9 backwards to 3. All of the drapes are closed, and behind them no lights are lit. Les knocks on the door. Nothing. He steps back into the yard and looks at the upper windows. He calls up.

“Helen!”

Nothing. He calls louder.

“Helen!”

Over the roof where the sky lets the house pass into the front yard, four men with rifles surround two full-blown zombies. The soldiers look up, spooked by the voice calling Helen coming in over their heads. The zombies echo the voice in words they bark at the soldiers: “Helen!” “Hello!” “Help!” They are agitated by the alliteration and their barks become frenzied: “Helly!” “Hello!” “Helen!” “Hessy!” The soldiers open fire, peppering zombie torsos with firecrackers. The bullets that enter the zombies cause them to turn slightly. This changes the trajectories of the missiles, so that as they exit they fly toward the front of the house and hit several inches away from where they would have had the zombies not been there. A little plaster gnome shatters where a summer rose might have been cut down. Once free of the bullets, the zombies stand still. Les, on the other hand, jumps clear into the air. He runs for the door with his elbows out like fins on a battering ram.

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!”

15 Ammo

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.

16 Picture Where You’ll Go

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.

17 The Rio Grande

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.

Dr. Mendez is seated at his desk, across which is stretched a body. He has decided to perform an unscheduled autopsy. So many strange deaths. Nothing to lose. Maybe a quick answer will show itself.

All of the body cavities have been opened and then hastily folded shut. Mendez lifts a corner of cheek back into position with his pen. The structure of the room behind him groans, the studs are returning to ninety-degree relationships. The waiting room is emptying.

All over the floor I imagine.

Dr. Mendez is right. As the crammed bodies redistribute their contents, under pressure, to fill the upper and lower parts of the space, the waiting room is returning to its shape. The living few are drowning and will not survive.

An epidemic of broken necks.

As he says this to himself Mendez knows that in two million years another species will unearth the skeletons of human beings. And then they will begin a great pastime. What broke all their necks? Did they build their ceilings too low? Did kick-boxing aliens once visit this planet? Did a meteor fall from the sky and whip around the globe at shoulder height? Mendez stands and approaches his file cabinet. He thinks: Well this is when the good physician should off himself, overwhelmed and thrust suddenly into such a medieval role. But no, instead he counts the bodies on his floor — six. The best is probably yet to come.

Down the road from the doctor’s office Ellen and Steve sit silently in the car. Steve is shaking his head. He wonders what all these cars are doing here. Ellen knows. She can hear the movement of zombies in the woods. The hunting stealth of exact steps carrying rabid people in the dark, just inside the bushes. Coiling their necks like cobras. Painful, empty minds. Their hundreds of round, open mouths hanging like bats from slick, wet branches.

Ellen knocks her door open and runs up the centre of the road, back beyond the cars, and turns quickly to leap blind into a wall of soft cedar. Steve remains in the car. He is so afraid that he can’t even move. The zombies are indiscriminate, and even though Steve has been sweet beyond compare, they will snatch him from behind the wheel and fight among themselves for the chance to snap his neck.

At that moment the angel who has been patiently rocking the ghost of the shallow and inconsolable Detective Peterson will look up with interest.

Ellen hides just inside the trees. Huddled, she stays still and silent. Just a few feet from where she sits a continuous line of zombies make their way down a path that runs parallel to, but hidden from, the road. She closes her eyes and feels herself drop inside and then plunge like a loose elevator. She has no time to imagine where she’s going. The core of her experience is free falling and the only visible sign of this is in the tightening of her lips. When she comes to rest she looks up the hundreds of feet above her head where she is crouched beside a tree. The atmosphere around her is black and cavernous. Ellen thinks: So long as this is somewhere that I am, someone can find me. She blinks her eyes, attempting to adjust to the darkness, and discovers fine streamers of red waving vertically, caught in an updraft just beyond her reach. She steps toward them, thinking, again: If I can move in this place, someone can find me here. I am in a place that can support life. She presses her hands against the invisible wall and feels a cork-board of resistance; it finally feathers against her fingers and disappears. If you come here to find me, I hope you discover this: the walls aren’t really walls here. Keep going, keep going. You’ll find me.

In this place, a bony little peninsula slicing into shallow silver water, Ellen is stepping forward, her bare toes gripping rock and displacing little black egg cups of water. When she reaches the crooked tip she returns to her crouch. She looks offinto the air above the water, into the streaks of a soft illumination around her, a hanging moss, impenetrable and glowing. This is an isolated place. Her heart sinks. People don’t come here. She drops her chin onto her knee and glides the backs of her knuckles, as if stroking a cat, in a little velvet inlet by her foot.

18 Your Name Is Wild

How often is a baby supposed to cry? There are probably answers. You can picture them. A doctor is saying every crying baby is in distress. Another says every crying baby is an exploring person. Ten times a day. The baby cried constantly. The baby cried in the morning but only for an hour. An hour? Doctor? An hour? The baby never cries. Never? No, never. OK, we’ll have to run some tests. Never?

Always. Les pulls over in Green River. The baby has been bent in a rigid bow on the seat beside him, crying a continuous wail for a full half-hour. Les slides his hand under the space beneath the baby’s arched back. Too intense. He tilts the stiff body back to rest across his palm. The wailing rises sharply. He’s in pain.

Les carefully slips his hand away. He makes a reassuring face to the infant. He touches its toes and its face inflames. Why, little boy? A man nearby pulls himself out from under an open hood. He looks over at Les. Les panics for a second. He cups both his hands, scaring himself. They are made for stifling babies. He feels a rush of compassion for the baby, but his compassionate hands can only press into the seat surrounding it, and failing thus he lifts them to his chest and grabs handfuls of himself, compassionately. I don’t know your name.

Its fingers are as blue as a baby sparrow’s head, and its entire body is locked in scream. Les looks out the window to make sure nobody else is nearby. The man repairing his car has gone. Repaired. The screams have caused the forest to close itself off and tuck its edges into a finer line under the sky. The painful tone sustains a frequency of such duration that it becomes soundless, and Les feels the blood leave his face. The silence packs his ears. He is afraid because he knows that the soundless car, leaning like a spike among the tick of gas pumps, is prompting him to know something — to know exactly, now, why his son is in such pain.

Withdrawal.

An opiate withdrawals crack jones intolerance of time.

I may have to kill my son.

Les hovers his hands over the baby, now little more than a knot of his own agony, and drops three fingers lightly on its face. Such a small commitment to infanticide. He curls the fingers up into his palm and withdraws the fist. Loving his son has suddenly become impossible. Les steps out of the car, and when he slams the door he again hears the little creature’s pain. He feels a terrible flood of guilt and grief. These feelings are kept from spilling by a tiny mopping sponge of self-pity.

His encroaching insanity has already converted this shadowy experience, which sits near his centre, into a delicate model. A mobile of silver half moons and flat gold slippers redistributes Les around the car. He feels the threads of suspension and the little wind that means so much now. Something is still here. Something can be done. If I Jail, I will destroy that baby and kill myself. Strong alternatives are needed. My son and I are crossing the line from sound to unsound body.

Across the highway is a mall. A drugstore. Les feels a strange smirk twist his face, and for the first time he loves his son, the little drug addict son of a bitch. He was born knowing what I know. When he reenters the car he opens the surface of his body onto the searing noise, feeling it drill deeply, and he smiles at his son through this atmosphere of pain.

19 Sound

Having never robbed a store before, Les has a nagging feeling, as he fingers the antihistamines, that the handgun tucked against his back just isn’t enough. He looks up at a camera swaying like a metal remora in the corner, and he brings his hand up to his face. Mask. He goes down the school-supplies aisle and, sure enough, finds a plastic mask tucked behind stack of lab books. It’s a cheap one. A thin elastic is hastily attached to the sides with staples. Small. He turns it over. A smiling blonde witch. A good witch. Les puts it on and reaches behind for the gun as he makes his way to the pharmacist. He waves the gun at a shape he can little more than locate through the slit windows of the dark interior of the mask. He sees a young man, a sideburn. Hand comes up. Stops. Goes down again.

“OK. Don’t shoot. Anything you want.”

Suddenly the elastic snaps and Les feels a wasp sting his ear. The mask jumps from his face directly into the open, pleading hands of the pharmacist. Les pulls the trigger of the gun and it clicks. It just clicks. No bullets. Les instinctively coughs to cover up the tiny noise, to camouflage it quickly. The pharmacist is looking down with horror at the mask in his hands. He feels the sheer panic of torn impulses and misses the click. He drops the mask on the counter.

“I won’t look. I didn’t see you. Please don’t shoot.”

Realizing he’s still in the game, Les sweeps the mask up, inadvertently dragging its code across a smudged window, setting off the piercing beep. A fuckin’ alarm. Les levels the gun at the pharmacist and fires. Click. This second click is covered up by the louder clang of the cash register opening as the pharmacist tries to illustrate the source of the beep. Les thinks, I’m doing a lot of killing. He waves the gun and instructs the pharmacist: “Dilaudid. All of your Dilaudid.”

The pharmacist races down an aisle and returns with a large plastic jar and drops it in front of Les. As he turns to leave, an elderly couple who have been watching everything take a step backward. He raises the gun and clicks it three times. Kill everybody. The couple don’t even flinch. Les barks at them and they run. Kill everybody.

20 How Many Times Have I Told You?

As they pull out of Green River, father and son are dissolving the blue halves of a Dilaudid under their tongues. As they sail through Greenwood, some minutes later, Dad thinks to himself: Well really, if the baby gets half, maybe I should take one and a half. He twirls off the lid and pops another into his mouth. Beside him his son is quiet. This is what it takes. Les flops a hand across the comfort of the steering wheel. I’m stoned. He feels the tiny fractures in his elbow melt over and strengthen. I have been conscripted into an army. Les smiles to himself. That kid at the pharmacy knows a little more now. The world has revealed the gun it points at him. Along the stretch of road between Brooklyn and Manchester, Les has his first fantasy about life with his son. A son he names Ernie.

21 It’s a Wonderful Life with Ernie

The church in Pontypool is one of those rural teeth that have turned slightly toward the back of the throat, missed by the toothbrush. It appears as a space, sometimes dark with dirt, sometimes cast in shadow. A round black-orange structure that sits off the back, under the trees, hides a tiny cemetery from the road. Two black Labradors are running between white-skinned headstones. One dog moves with a dip and find gait, and the other follows, not trusting its own navigation because of the chopstick deformity in its jaw which causes its lower teeth to slap eastward when it goes south. The dogs stop in the woods just beyond the back row of headstones and they circle a contraption made of metal tubing and the flesh of old tires. The lead dog takes a hunk of this rubber in its mouth and growl whines at the other while it blinks its intelligent eye from side to side. The contraption is a large cartoon of a bear trap made out of a bike rack. Around the playing dogs are trees cut to their stumps.

This is the theatre of Les Reardon. The sculpture, now being dragged to the back door of the church by one of the Labs, is the skeletal form of a stage prop that was to have been central in his first production, The Harrowing of Hell. Les had spent many afternoons sitting on a stump here, blowing cigarette smoke at the bugs in his face — a new habit — picturing the children of Pontypool emerging through hinged jaws to climb up onto a sunlit bed of moss and lie spent and ancient at the feet of their proud parents. The Harrowing of Hell was not to be. The drama coach of Pontypool, Les Reardon suffered a massive relapse of a painful mental illness. He was treated; however, that treatment forced him to eventually stagger off home from school, under the draining influence of strong medication. His wife, Helen, and their son, Ernie, spent the last couple of months walking as light as prayer around Les as he lay on the couch under an orange throw. He clutched the remote in two fingers that he poked through the loose crochet of the blanket. The medication eventually worked, and the drama of his psychosis quieted; still, he was so weighted with the drug’s wisdom that he was unable to coach, unable to lead the children from hell to their parents’ feet.

The priest who had donated an area around the cemetery to the teacher’s project took pity on the man who lost his mind in the woods behind his church. When Les returned some weeks later, altered but less wild, to wander with stiff limbs across his stage, the priest offered him a job. The job that the holy man concocted for Les already existed in larger city parishes. He applied for the funding and was immediately granted the means to hire the first rural Custodian of Dogs. Les managed to walk and feed the dogs for one week only — the brief spell after his energy rose from under the medication and before that energy was wasted against a chaotic range of depressions. As his desire to live met with the life he would have to live, Les slipped on his own weight, down a rope that dropped him under a crocheted blanket on the couch, where he sits, once again, with two fingers poking through the loose weave to direct a remote control. This summer, Ernie experiences his first vacation from school as an adolescent. The priest, who still needed an employee, gave the son the father’s job and Ernie inherited the title Custodian of Dogs.

Ernie spent July wandering in disgust among the ruins of his father’s life: the destroyed bits of forest, the hiding places under plastic. And the job: waiting for dogs to shit — a wait his father was now unable to endure. In the evening he couldn’t bear to be in the same house as the man, so he’d invent things he had to do at the church and then drive off in the car his father could barely understand. His nightly request for the keys was met with an uncomprehending stare and lips so dry that Ernie winced when they touched to speak.

Tonight, Helen will answer the phone and learn that someone has stolen one hundred and forty-six dollars from the church’s petty cash. In three days the police will call to tell her that they have apprehended Ernie Reardon. She spends these days comforting a poor husband who has long retreated into an uncaring silence. In the coming months, as his depression sinks into a lifelong organization, Les will never miss an opportunity to appear misunderstood and wounded. He feels himself domineering, emerging in his family for the first time, and he will twist forever in a kind of happiness that will never abandon him.

22 Midlife Heat Score

As they pull through Myrtle Station an OPP car passes them and slows. Les looks at the baby drowsing peacefully on the seat, its small feet pressed against the barrel of a handgun and the bulk jar of Dilaudid sitting on the floor mat. The arrangement makes Les think of pieces gathered at the start square of a board game. He moves the handgun onto the floor and slides it with his foot under the seat. The lights on the OPP cruiser fire off and Les pulls his stolen car onto the shoulder. The cop steps out onto the pavement of the highway and, before approaching Les’s vehicle, takes in the spot: the six cows gathered near the muddy back of a barn, the twenty odd birds strung like pointy teeth on a hydro wire. He calculates something, reading the fresh spring with a local’s discerning eye, and moves his hat forward to accept a message given. He stops halfway between the two cars and realizes that he’s approaching a stolen vehicle. He drops to a squat, withdraws his sidearm and, with his hands joined and fingers pointing along with the barrel, shouts from his elbows. Les lays his hand on the spot that has grown so comforting to him, his son’s warm belly, and decides, while there’s time, barely perhaps, to imagine yet another life for him and little Ern.

23 Yet Another Life for Him and Little Em

“Did Ernie take the Boy or the Girl for lunch?”

Helen hasn’t sat down all morning. She hovers over the kitchen sink: above it stretches a narrow shelf littered with Mommy’s drug things. A spoon with a soggy bit of filter; a lighter; three origami packets lined in some priority to the left; a thin razor blade. Helen pushes a long fingernail into the enveloped opening at the top of one of the packets.

“Les, honey.”

Les is seated at the kitchen table. A light sweat has broken out on his forehead.

“No, thank you dear.”

Helen stops twirling the plunger of a syringe in her spoon and looks over her shoulder at her husband.

“No? I mean, no. What do you mean? I didn’t get that.”

Les scratches his shoulders with crossed arms.

“I mean no, darling, I’m OK. I did some of the Girl after I did the Boy, so I’m alright — you just make yourself right, there, don’t worry about me.”

“OK, OK. I’m glad that you did the Girl already, that’s what I’m fixing here, but I asked whether Ernie went off with the Boy and the Girl. He never forgets the Boy, he thinks that’s all he needs, but he misses half his lessons, so I tell him if he takes some of the Girl, not too much y’know, but a little wake up, and he’ll do better at school. Makes the Boy a nice after-school wind down. So I was asking, did Ernie take the Girl with him to school this morning?”

Les is doing his morning reading, an interview with Liv Tyler in Details; beside his right hand is a thawing cup of wheat grass juice.

“Oh honey, I don’t know. He left early.”

Helen walks across the kitchen floor with a syringe dangling and clinging to the crook of her arm. She stands in front of a large television. A Breakfast Television celebrity is watching a small man drag a comb through brown paint to create a fake wood grain. Helen observes the process, mindless of the unadministered drug laying like a broken branch from her arm. As the segment concludes, opening a replay box over the audience and a scroll of the next segment beneath them, Helen lifts the syringe away from her forearm and works it slowly, playing in her arm with its searching tip. She is obviously enjoying herself as she parries with the moment of injection. The moment comes and goes and Helen returns to the kitchen sink. She turns her back to it and leans long enough to push herself into a walk through the kitchen again. Her walking, not quite a pace, and not without some meaningful gestures, is what she concentrates on, experimenting with the pleasure of appearing not so crazy.

“I think… I think… Lester, I think Ernie is doing really well at school.”

Les is reading the advertisement for a hair-loss treatment on the page opposite the Liv Tyler interview. The interview continues seventy-five pages later, but Les thinks he may never return to this particular point in the magazine again, so he’s taking his time before moving on. Helen has left the kitchen again, and she exits down the hallway. But she returns too soon to have actually left for any other reason than the opportunity to come back to the kitchen.

“He’s really good with math, y’know? He gets that from me, I think. I have a cousin who’s an architect. But he also gets it from you, you’re good with numbers.”

Helen disappears and returns again, this time having retrieved three notebooks from a room down the hall. She sits across from Les, who has moved on to the conclusion of the Liv Tyler interview. Helen stacks the books in front of her and opens the first with a formality that reminds her of her own mother.

“Look at this… Oh my god!… This is totally neat… He’s doing algebra… I knew it…”

Helen looks up, irritated. Les is flipping through the magazine now, comparing the icons that signify the conclusions of articles, wondering whether the feeling of conclusion is just an effect of their appearance on the pages.

“Oh, look, he does drawings here in the margins… That’s cool… He could draw for the comics…”

Les looks up, closing the magazine on a finger to mark his place.

“Do some of the Boy. I think I need some of the Boy — let’s split a tenth, honey.”

Helen closes the notebook and returns to her narrow shelf. “I wonder if he forgot those books this morning. He needs his notebooks.” She opens the lid of a packet with a fingernail. “A student can’t take notes without a notebook. How come he left his notebooks here?” As she sets up a small blue jar of distilled water on the counter she flips two antiseptic swipes out of her pyjama pocket. “Maybe he has a locker. Maybe the books he uses at school are in his locker.”

Les is distracted. He’s looking at a large photograph of Lena Olin that fills a tall page in an old issue of Interview. A bar of sand clings to the side of her bare foot. So wrinkled, he thinks. Not age, just… foot wrinkled.

“Sweety, I’ve only got a quarter left…”

Les rumples his nose with a loose fist; the skin of his face, now arid, folds and bends without resisting.

“Sweety, how… uh… how much do you have?”

Les scratches the back of his head with the vigour of a porch dog. He has been preparing to ignore this question long before it has occurred to Helen. Not that he won’t answer, and she won’t mind asking two or three times, it’s just a kind of protocol of married life.

“Hmmm… I thought I had at least a half… Well, let’s do a Tee anyway, right honey?”

Les is drawing bubbles on a photograph of a martini glass. Mmmmm. Hmmm.

“OK, yes, a nice half-Tee, that’ll be nice for us. Uh… Les, how much do you have left?”

Les draws the stick of an umbrella leaning out of the martini.

“Sorry, sugar. What did you say?”

Helen snaps a blade through a pebble of heroin, pinning the halves on either side of the tiny knife with her fingers. She asks again with a voice that is patient and refreshed.

“Oh, I was just wondering how much of the Boy you have left.”

Les pushes the magazine to the edge of the table, conscious of what it would take to send it sailing onto the floor.

“How much of the Girl is left there?”

Helen lifts her hands from what she’s doing and slides another packet into the area of her operation. She opens it without lifting it from the shelf.

“Two big grams.”

She looks over her shoulder at Les. She feels she deserves her answer now.

“Three-quarters. Second drawer. In the purple box. Pull it out.”

Les puts a flint of power in his mouth and it only allows him to use short sentences. When Helen puts the larger bindle on the table in front of Les, he covers it with one hand, watching her back while she loads two syringes.

“Here darling.”

They silently administer the heroin and listen, in the seconds that follow, for more comfortable breathing in each other. Helen smiles at Les and he returns the gesture. Her smile twists apologetically and she returns to the shelf. The Girl again. Christ. Helen, you’re not in control of what you’re doing. Les says nothing as he spins the packet towards himself and opens it.

“What the fuck is this?”

Helen jumps, dropping a new syringe into the sink.

“Fuck Les, fuck!”

“No. No. Really, Helen, what the fuck is this? There’s only a couple of Tees here.”

“No! Oh no! Fuck! Fuck! Are you sure? Lemme see!”

“There was almost a gram in here this morning! Where the fuck is it?”

“I don’t know, Les! I don’t fucking know. Oh God!”

Helen is screaming now. Crying and angry, she reaches across the table for the packet. Les makes quick fists, striking distance; to protect her he stomps his feet.

“Ernie! Fucking Ernie! He’s selling at school! The fucker!”

Helen whips open the top drawer and pulls out a handgun.

“OK you little fuck! I can’t fuckin’ believe him! I’ll kill him.”

“No you won’t.”

Helen looks up, confused, still crying, the rims of her eyes are flicking around her sockets.

“But keep the fucking gun out anyway.”

Helen places the gun on the table and with a gluey pull at her nose she returns to the shelf. Les stares at her back. She is struggling with the cocaine, messing up her fix and saying “Fuck!” every six or seven seconds. Les picks up the gun, checks the chamber for rounds, and lays it flat against the inside of his thigh.

“I can’t fucking take this. I need some music.”

24 Yet Another Life for Him and Em: Part 2

Les looks down at his son before stepping out onto the highway. He takes the word Ernie away from his boy. He leaves the baby to scratch, nameless and alone, at the red patches that have risen on his wrists. The OPP officer and Les stare at each other. Neither of them has a clear idea of what happens next. They are both expecting to die, though they have probably never been in safer company. In fact, they are both pretty much willing to die for each other. The officer makes the first move. Gracefully and delicately, he floats his right hand out and down. Down. Lie down. The gesture is so compelling that a shrub nearby bends several of its tiny white flowers toward the ditch it overhangs. It encourages Les to crouch against the road, to block out a place there. On his stomach, Les breathes out the weight of his back onto his lungs, blowing clear a patch of asphalt by his cheek.

This is the end of the line.

At the station house Les is put into custody. He is asked quietly for his rare possessions. The arresting officer is agreeable and polite. The superficial pleasure of the procedure baffles Les. It reminds him of a Latin exercise from school. He is a noun in declension — all the handcuffs, the five coils of smoke on his fingertips, the secretive case, the ablative justice of the peace and an entire world that will, except for him, run on a series of sentences that begin with the letter O.

Les is sitting in just such a circle. He has given his son up to the law. He has surrendered his illegal firearm. The controlled substance he shared with the baby. The stolen vehicle and its violent history. Murder. He has given the OPP a murder.

Les sits in a chair in the small police station outside Caesarea not knowing that a growing number of people in Ontario are now also giving the OPP murder. All across the province vicious gangs of cannibals are moving on the police, sweeping through like a system of weather, snatching up large parts of the population. Les fishes in his pocket for one of the Dilaudid that he had managed to scoop from the jar before his arrest and he pops it in his mouth. He has already begun to contemplate other forms of consuming the drug, and he anticipates, with an excitement that makes him chew the pill, a man he’ll meet in the shower who’ll slip a syringe into his hand and then drop his fingers against the side of his penis. The officer has left him sitting alone for over an hour to picture prison life. In an adjacent room Les hears the first yelp of a son who is stirring back up into cutting discomfort.

There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into diphthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught by surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and the sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.

If Les were to remove his shirt, turn his broad back to a light source and allow a map to be drawn there, sharp metal flags could be used to mark the progress of his dead wife’s name, while the top of his underwear could be used to absorb blood as it flows past his belt. The curved red stain that dips over the cleft of his buttocks resembles the smile that has yet to become important to him.

He stands over his son, a little pink twitching man, and he shrugs out our pushpins as he lifts the infant in his blanket. The baby spits out the pill. Les has to insert it into the baby’s throat across the tongue with a finger. Les holds the tiny body against himself; it resists like an insect would, kicking with limbs that improvise. Les holds on in a crush, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

Soon the baby slackens, the way that babies do when they give up, and Les realizes that he is alone in the police station. Alone with his son and, lying beside a jar of Dilaudid, on the desk, both his gun and the keys to his car. Les puts the keys in his pocket and, juggling the jar and baby like twins, thinks: not mine, really, nobody’s.

He leaves the empty station and finds his car. Driving it from the small pound, he feels a little less excited about his escape than he had about his capture. The objects he carries cling together in inventory. They are only designed to go full circle and he feels them moving beside him. He hears them: “How can we stay meaningful in this, the loose wing of your adventure?”

Les looks down at the son he renames Ernie in desperation, and he cries because a mighty army of questions is bursting in on him from somewhere. I am too small. A tear, followed quickly by another, hangs off his upper lip and turns to a salty drizzle on his tongue. I want to be him. Les lays his hand across baby Ernie’s tiny forearm and he feels the cool chiaroscuro of the tubular limb in his palm — a peaceful place, a narcotic baby world.

I want to drive my car in there.

25 Somewhere Familiar

One of the circles that remains for Les to complete is made round in Caesarea. Les pulls the grey Datsun up into a driveway over an oil stain that drops like a tumbler beneath the car, clicking into place midway along the chassis. The house is a long lakefront structure with wide windows. He steps out of the car. He doesn’t recognise this place, though he has been here before. He does hear the distant jungle thrum of his wife’s name distorted and repeated by a relay of zombie mumbling. He can’t distinguish the word as he stands searching the white air for the source of what he thinks, with alarm, must be a very loud noise somewhere. Some kind of crazy tree bugs. Les scoops his inventory out of the car and sneaks like Santa Claus around the house, into the backyard that slopes its fine yellow lawn down to Lake Scugog.

“Hello!”

The voice is deep and torn; booming out around him it scrapes the water.

“Helen!”

What the hell? Les turns from the boat he’s loading with guns and drugs and babies. The Knockouts. The woman he had struck earlier, still in her pyjamas, is lying on her back, tucked under the hedge that Les has just walked by. She waves a hand that’s missing two fingers and bangs her knees together in what sounds like an attempt to strike out the consonant L.

“Helen!” The little bald man appears through the sliding door. He is not Helen. He is also in pyjamas that bear a long stripe of mud. He grabs the doorframe and launches himself, on hips that pop audibly, into a surprisingly quick flight across the yard. In seconds he is on the dock driving his open mouth at Les’s face. The zombie’s mouth is now telescopic in its reach, and migrating birds take off and land through a hole that opens on his cheek. Les clamps onto the fiend’s arms and propels him into the water. He then jumps into the boat and hauls on the rip cord. The Knockout emerges waist high at the rear of the craft. He has been screaming under water and his voice pierces the air, exploding past sluggish submarine vibrations. He leaps up into the boat, locking his teeth on Les’s knee, and grabs the gun from the seat. With a dorsal fin flip of his arm the gun flies up onto the shore. Les pulls on the cord again, knocking the zombie’s head from his knee with a speeding elbow. The engine finally blathers to life.

The propeller, it should be said, is entering the zombie’s stomach. It releases an underwater ticker tape parade around the man’s waist. His intestines blow their contents out into the lake like party favours unravelling and filling with breath, marking and limiting the excitement. A school of perch, with pointy hats that fall drunkenly over their eyes and straps that pull at delicate gills, is circulating through the loose ambergris. The zombie caves in over the cannon ball in its middle and folds in half on the bottom of Lake Scugog. The boat, something of a paintbrush now, is still tied to the dock. As it extends itself it floats a long feather boa of blood on the clear water. Les scrambles to the front to untie the boat, and after some jagged manoeuvring, made complicated by the interfering scalp of the zombie, the boat is soon cutting the lake into one of the infinite number of wakes that water places under all vessels. Les and his son are finally carried away, on a silver tray, out from Ontario’s zombies towards and horribly close to a fierce little island that is caught in a discrete destiny, one that’s strange to the rest of the province.

26 What Is So Fine?

Ellen Peterson is not a zombie. She is standing in the dark, at the edge of a pool. She is not entirely sure whether she has walked here or whether magical inward steps have led her here to a place that she makes of herself. The surface of the pool reflects the full moon, and, Ellen thinks, it looks like a large plate in the centre of a satin tablecloth. Ellen drops to a crouch and places the tips of her fingers into the cool, still water. She wriggles her fingers and watches the reflected moon. It soon breaks into diamonds on the surface — diamonds she feels against the back of her hand. Ellen stops moving her fingers and the moon collects itself as white filings haloed over a magnet. Then it breaks again. This time clear in half. Someone is in the water. Ellen shrinks back from the edge. She focuses in the dark and silhouettes start to appear. A fallen tree lies across the bushes. This is familiar. A boulder, now lightly glowing, sits in the water at the far side of the pool. This is the carp pond. Ellen is relieved that she is in fact somewhere: a somewhere that she knows. I am the reeve of this pond. Someone is gliding through the water near the boulder. Ellen feels less threatened. She has jurisdiction here.

“Hello there.”

Ellen stands on the bank, closing the front of her bathrobe: a reeve in a bathrobe is better than no reeve at all. The person in the water stops and turns toward her with a splash.

“Excuse me, hello, is everything alright in there?”

“What do you mean?”

The man’s voice is whiny and defensive. There is something disturbing in the question.

“I’m Ellen Peterson, the reeve of Pontypool. There’s a great deal of trouble in the area tonight, and I’m asking if everything is OK with you in there. Aren’t you cold?”

Another voice to her left.

“Why, if he’s cold will he freeze?”

The voice, so tremulous, makes her shiver. The question somehow hasn’t been put to her rhetorically.

“Well, no, I don’t think he’ll freeze.”

A third voice in the bushes behind her.

“Are you lying to him? Is he going to freeze?”

The voice is so frightened that Ellen covers her mouth.

The man in the water has slipped behind the boulder and he holds its sides with his hands.

“If you’re lying to me then you could hate me.”

Ellen drops her hand. She feels the pull of sadness in the light that has emerged on the surface of the tree hiding these people.

“I don’t know you; I couldn’t… hate you.”

The head and shoulders of the man to her left glide into view at the centre of the pool.

“You don’t hate him yet. But if you don’t know him will you stab him with a knife?”

The man behind her squeals sharply, and he flees crashing through the trees. Ellen can’t quite believe this conversation. She has no idea how to meet its requirements.

The conversation that she is having isn’t, of course, normal.

That conversation would have its several participating members hitting a variety of vocal registers using a tiny lexicon. This lexicon has migrated to them from Parkdale, and they communicate through it with the sonic sensitivity of birds. They repeat the words Helen, help and hello in an evolution of the alliteration that’s more like an imbrication, shingling the words over a now silent H. And exactly who is stepping down into the pond and repeating the phrase “messy car, dirty bird”? Ellen has not detected the eighteen silent beings that surround the pool, hiding in fear among the trees. Each of them moves three words from cheek to cheek, like loose peas in a whistle.

“What do you mean stab you?”

Ellen’s robe rides in a terry cloth wake around her as she steps through the water toward the boulder.

“That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.”

Ellen stops still as three other beings float out from under branches that overhang the pool’s edge. They move steadily in the moonlight, forming a guard around the boulder.

“He means what he said. Now you want to kill him.”

“No. I don’t.”

“If you don’t want to kill him, does that mean that you want to run him over with a car?”

One of the silhouettes yelps as if struck and dives to the side.

“I… I… don’t want to hurt any of you.”

Ellen is aware that the pool is now occupied by at least a dozen of these strange people.

“Not hurt? Not hurt? Do you mean not hurt now, but later? Like in the morning you’ll want to punch all of us? Punch us with a cannon?”

“Or a missile?”

“Or… or… maybe poison?”

“And angry now? Are you angry now?”

Three zombies splash at the water in a strange seizure that ends in one of them attacking another. The zombie being attacked strokes the back of his assailant with a consoling hand. The assailant bites uncontrollably at the man’s chest, opening a honeycomb of muscle and flesh. The victim soon slides under the water, and his mouth, the last cup on his body to be filled, glides away to drown. Ellen feels a panic lock her.

The killer stands up straight and exhales heavily, sending a piece of tongue flipping into the water. A woman directly behind Ellen speaks.

“Say sorry.”

The killer shakes his hands in the water. He closes his eyes, and in an emotional outburst that is small and painful he rolls his head back.

“I can’t.”

Ellen steps forward, her heart pounding in her chest. She raises open hands across the water and moves slowly toward the killer.

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

A teenage girl jumps out of a tree and stands in a moonlit path that drops into the pool.

“He doesn’t?”

Ellen feels a carp slide itself like a cat against her ankle. A mile long. She catches her breath and waits for it to pass.

“No, he doesn’t have to be sorry.”

Another carp swims into Ellen’s joined heels. She turns her foot, letting it move between her calves. It’s slippery and fat and it tickles. A group of eight zombies moves quietly off the bank into the water. Several of them ask the same question at once.

“It’s OK that he killed Albert?”

Ellen scoops water up onto her dry lips. She notices the little bump of Albert’s floating tongue.

“It’s OK. It’s OK.”

27 Policy

Now the pool is becoming crowded with quiet zombies. They all seem to like being submerged up to their chests, so when they enter the water they sink to their knees in the mud and stone of its black bottom. Ellen is standing and she appears elevated on an artificial surface. Ellen notices that some of them have turned their backs and are busily working at something on the bank at the water’s edge. The soft fan of a tail runs against her shin. The carp is sitting on the floor of the pool, stationary. It caresses Ellen’s leg, and she is reminded again of a cat.

Nearly all the zombies have turned their backs on her. A woman working beside the fallen log turns her head to a man beside her.

“It’s OK to kill biting, y’know.”

The man remains hunched over.

“And I know it’s OK to tear fuckin’ fuckers’ heads off.”

The woman pulls from her spot and turns to Ellen.

“Is it OK?”

Ellen can see mud dripping down the woman’s chin. It looks like the chinstrap of a warrior’s helmet.

“Is what OK?”

All of the zombies stop, some of them grab the tree branches above their heads. A rhythm of ripples on the water’s surface smoothes. Ellen slips farther under, to her knees. She feels the little plosive blast as her carp propels itself off her thigh.

“It’s OK to… uh… sure, it’s OK.”

“How about killing them?”

Ellen feels a carp’s face in the upturned soul of her foot. It extends its sucker mouth and kisses her there. Ellen answers the question through a smile caused by a second carp on her other foot.

“Killing them is alright.”

“And slapping and slapping all the assholes in their heads?”

“Yes. Yes. It’s OK.”

“What else is alright?”

The carp have now settled into a synchronized kissing and Ellen drops her hands to her sides. She feels the soft drapery of fish moving along the insides of her wrists.

“Anything.”

“Can’t I ask?”

A zombie becomes agitated and turns from the bank.

“If she asks are you going to hit her in the ass?”

“No, no, she can ask whatever she wants.”

“Can I too?”

“Yes.”

“OK, OK. Is it OK to have a policeman banging on the door?”

“Yes.”

“Me too, me too. Um, I don’t have a question.”

“Will you bash his face in if he doesn’t have a question?”

“No. No, I won’t.”

As they turn and lobby questions at Ellen she finds herself struggling, with some success, to configure the affirmation. She begins to focus her eyes on what it is that they’re doing on the bank. A busy geometry of forms begins to emerge. It sits lit on the surface of the dark and appears like a computer language, a dense and complex glyphic architecture. The patterns emerging are uniform all around her. Ellen recognizes something in the tightly braided wall. She remembers doing things. After she got sick. She remembers emptying an ice cube tray into the sink and filling it again. Returning it to the freezer. And the terrible waiting for the water to freeze so that she could refill it with fresh water. It was in filling those awful hours that Ellen built, out of the contents of a cupboard, her library of seals. She recalls her surprise, her astonishment, that she was able to create and retain an infinite machine on a single shelf in the pantry. The complex stability of the number six in a can of pears, each half-fruit changing. The not-yet-ten in tiers across the cookie bag. The disappointing threes risen into a number only guessed at, but always guessed correctly, by a red hexagonal tower in the shadows. And when she had finished visiting her shelf she would check the ice cubes. And if they were not yet frozen, maybe nearly, little windowed boxes of water, she’d sit at the kitchen table and feel comfortable that she had set things in motion.

On the surface of the white cupboards a scroll of light marks fly rapidly from left to right — the stories released by the machines behind their doors, and Ellen memorizes each one. Some days they are the long, incomprehensible speeches of angels. Sometimes they detail the death of a child. And other times they list all of the things that Ellen hasn’t said yet. If these marks were to stop moving and rise in relief from the cupboards, and lift off like a new wall, slipping through the floor to line the banks of a pond in the dark, then Ellen would be looking at them over the shoulders of busy zombies. She strokes the head of a giant fish banging against her knees and opens her legs. These poor people have all suffered strokes. A zombie approaches the pool carrying a large, full garbage bag. She empties the contents out onto the surface of the water behind the working zombies. They reach, without looking back, to scoop up eggshells and plastic bottles.

28 Hungry Like the Wolf

What is an autobiography? What can fairly be said to lie within its bounds, share in its purpose? Is there someone hidden in Les Reardon? Was he a garbage truck driver who had a psychotic breakdown? Did he then become a drama teacher? Did a woman one month pregnant leave him in the middle of this career shift? Did he battle zombies across Ontario in a stolen car with his son wailing in drug withdrawal beside him? Are these little autobiographemes inserted into imagined lives? Probably. But still, that’s not autobiography. Not really.

Is this an autobiography?

Yes.

29 Autobiography

Twelve years ago you were living on the streets of Vancouver. You panhandled every day on Robson with a partner named Tommy. Those were miserable days — the good ones spent on the nod, the bad ones spent in a Lysol induced aggression. You had come to these dire straits in the usual way — an enduring dependence on substances and a persistent holocaust of personality. Usual, yes, but very difficult to survive. You tell this story not to mark yourself with it or to gain sympathy — it is, after all, only the story of a stubborn little bastard. You are telling this story, or at least just enough of it, so that you will never have to mention it again.

This one day you stirred to life beneath a shrub in Oppenhiemer Park. The shirt you were wearing had a light green fuzz growing across the back. You remember it because it was pretty. You had a sharp pain in your right forearm. You made your way across the park to where you knew Tommy would be waiting. You noticed you were getting a lot of attention from people who had, like you, spent the night in the park. There was something wrong with the way you looked. You remember someone saying to you, “In the first month you get stabbed; in the second month you’ll stab someone.” You had the feeling that somehow you were entering one of those months when people pay their last respects. Tommy grabbed you by your good arm and hurried you towards Robson. He was excited about something that had happened. At the best of times you can’t understand him and this morning he’s so stimulated by something that you can only grunt back at him in the language you share. You know that you have been barking at people lately. In fact, that’s why you got thrown out of the Columbia Hotel. “Do you know you’ve been barking at people in the lobby?” You shrug miserably at this kind of question. No, I’m afraid I didn’t know.

You notice people staring at you while Tommy pantomimes a little war scene. You smile and feel something warm drip off your chin. You cup your hand against your face and watch it fill with fresh blood. Oh dear. Sometimes you can’t help notice how sick you’re becoming. You look over your shoulder, but nobody’s looking. They have stopped staring. Tommy drags you into a public washroom. You throw up in the sink. It’s a dry heave, productive only in the spray of blood it forces out of your face. You look up into the mirror. You have two black eyes, cut deeply, and a missing eyebrow. Your bottom lip has fallen free of your mouth and is lying in the fresh blood on your chin.

You can’t pretend that you don’t feel very sorry for this man and his self-portrait. He has completely lost the ability to take care of himself. He will die soon, and the fact that that is merely all he ever wanted doesn’t make you feel any less protective of him now. You remember looking in the mirror and feeling awe: the self-portrait is complete. You think that you have found the face that can finally say goodbye.

That’s when Tommy slipped, unconscious, to the floor. You stepped over his body to find him a coffee. When you returned a few minutes later an ambulance was pulled up on the grassy hill that sloped down to the men’s washroom. Two attendants were putting Tommy’s body in the back of the vehicle. You attempted to stop them, dropping the coffees and yelling what you can’t say for certain now wasn’t barking. You tried to tell them that he was fine, that he just needed coffee, that he’d be OK. You tried to tell them that you needed him. As the ambulance drove off you felt an idea throbbing in your forearm. You’ll meet him at the emergency. You’ll tell them about your arm. They’ll let you in.

No one at the hospital had seen or heard of Tommy. You waited for three hours to see a doctor. Every time a door opened or a gurney banged through swinging glass you’d look up for your friend. One of the effects of the wait that you hadn’t counted on was that you were beginning a fairly complicated process of withdrawal. Your legs began to hurt. Your arm began to shake.

When the doctor finally takes you in she searches the holes and bruises in your head. It’s not your head, however, that you want her to look at. It’s your arm and you hold it up. She holds it gently and lays cool fingers on your wrist. She disappears, and soon a technician appears to take you to X-ray. It takes him a few runs to get a good shot. Your arm is jumping around. You feel miserable about this because you like working with people. He is impatient — with himself you think — and when he gets a satisfactory picture he puts a hand on your shoulder, including you in the success.

“Well, there’s three hairline fractures on your fibula.”

The doctor supports your hand by the palm with three of her powerful fingers.

“We’ll have to put it in a cast.”

She lays your arm on your thigh and it jumps up across your knee. She watches this and then turns to a cabinet. She pulls a gauze sleeve over your wrist and your fingers catch on the fibre, each one snapping out independently. She stops. You can tell that she’s looking at your face, your self-portrait. You don’t look up. You hold it as still as you can.

“You’re going to have some trouble with this. I’m going to get a Valium for you, maybe two.”

When she leaves you hold your forearm up. A long, white glove. You let a falcon land on it and draw it closer, allowing its hooked beak to close on your lips. The bird flits a tiny brown tongue along the rip of your bottom lip. By the time the doctor returns you have an erection. You fold your wrists in your lap and as she unties the swollen arm from the thin one she sees your cock standing against the filthy fabric of your crotch. It’s confusing to you. Clear to her. She places two powder blue pills in your good hand and you pop them across your mouth and down your throat. She leaves again; to let the benzodiazapine have its effect, you think.

Your arm softens in your lap, your erection subsides, and you feel the emotional catchbasin of interrupted withdrawal back up, clogging your pores, drying your forehead. More of a wreck for the abating anxiety. There is an opiate drizzling weakly across the agony in your back.

The doctor comes back.

“Do you drink?”

You smile. Well, isn’t it a shame?

“I notice you have track marks on your arms.”

You make a face like Buster Keaton, tilting your jaw. Yes, the problem is huge, altogether too far gone, I think.

“I’ve been talking to another physician and he’s calling a detox for you now.”

You look up. No, you don’t have to do that for me, but thank you so very much. Do you think it will help? Doctor? You can tell she likes you, which is such a strong feeling that you are already looking forward to saying goodbye. A man appears in the door and they look at each other. A sweet history of desire links them and you believe, as you watch them, you see her panties tugging upward and the jelly mould of his cock melting down his leg. You believe that they are becoming linked through you.

“Uh… I contacted a detox and, well, you’ve been banned from there for thirty days.”

The female doctor drags four spears of black hair from her forehead with the plaster-speckled back of her hand.

“Well, there’s more than one detox in the city.”

You think they will take you home.

“Yeah, I know doctor, I’ve tried a few actually, and there’s a…” He nods to you, too late to say serious things, it’s time to load the bier. “There’s a province-wide ban on the fella.”

The doctor looks at you. The worse you are, the more you matter to her. She would do anything not to insult you now. Now that you are what these two have always shared, the patient still living who will be lost. She pauses dramatically over the wounds on your face, and you turn your head slightly, so the light catches the medical rainbow that bends across your left cheek.

“I can’t believe that. What are we supposed to do with him?”

With him, you think. She didn’t say for him. You feel a light whip turn over inside your arm. We all love each other, that is obvious now.

The emergency ward has wide windows that slide open at the prompting of ocean air, warm air that moves in across the sunlit desk. There is a white grit of beach sand on the floor emptied out from the sneakers of hundreds of children who pass the same foot wound back and forth around a giant log in English Bay. You are standing halfway to the sliding door, with a white cast and dark smelling clothes. She is upset, standing behind the desk. She looks to him, we can’t just let him go.

He looks back. We have to. We can’t kill him. He looks to you. I wish we could, but we can’t.

Then they smile. We have to learn how to say goodbye now. You smile back, not so confused by the pitch of emotion as they are. You are, after all, the one who is going to die, the one they’ll think about.

As you leave through the doors you look over your shoulder and see them hook arms; the wave they share to you says: No one has mattered until you, thank you. They have an enthusiasm about where you’re going that you know will take you there.

You decide that you have enjoyed saying goodbye so much that you will spend the rest of the day looking for people to say goodbye to. You make your way to the social services office.

You tell them that you are leaving the province. There are two women behind desks who are visibly relieved.

“Oh, I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

The other, more serious, looks up above her glasses.

“You would die here soon, you know. That’s what happens, I’ve seen it. Good for you. You should go.”

“Yes, yes, congratulations. I think you’ve finally come to something.”

It’s all they can do to remain at their desks and not come around and kiss you. You lift your cast and wiggle your fingers. They return the wave, nodding to your cast. It hangs now from a rear-view mirror. You include everything in the enthusiasm that you feel.

You have trouble finding more people to say goodbye to, and as the afternoon tips toward the end of office hours your Valium stay is starting to come loose. Buildings close in, much like you’d imagine, and you start to react fearfully to the people around you.

Soon you’re in a small parking lot between two cars fighting with two guys. They seem to think the key to the struggle is to pin your elbows together. You remember clearly piping in a voice to throw them off: A calmer head prevails, and, sirs, it is the same head that bites you.

You say in a universally appealing voice: “I can see a straitjacket working rather well in this type of situation.”

It is the first clear sentence that you’ve spoken aloud in weeks. One of the men raises his hand and grunts. He hates you. You grunt back. You’re not saying goodbye to these fuckers. As far as these things go, you’ll just stick to formula and soon you’ll be unconscious. Put there either by the blows they deliver or by violently ducking from hands that reach down to help you.

The next day you are a psychiatric patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital. They start you almost immediately on a diet of Lithium, Amitriptiline and Ativan, with a methadone taper. Fine, you think. You know exactly how long it will be before these drugs change your circuitry. Fine. A long way off. You spend the day sitting on the brand new couch in a tiny smoking room. Floating across the carpet at your feet, like an immense cat, is H/ellen.

H/ellen is about sixty, with long grey hair, and she is pulling at the hem of a light linen smock that is too short. She lies on her side, and you think she must weigh about three hundred pounds. She has the expression of an eight year old in trouble. Around her swollen hand on the carpet lie cigarette spokes. Twelve of them, browned at the tips, but unsmoked, they fan out from her splayed fingers.

“Gotta smoke?”

You flip H/ellen a cigarette. In ten minutes you flip her another, this time watching what she does with it. She puts it in her mouth and reaches down to a pack of matches folded into her sleeve. The heads of the matches are bent up like a fleeing mob and she twists off a stick to strike it. She manages this, rolling onto her back, and she takes the flare before it becomes orange and extinguishes it in the tip of the cigarette. She rolls back onto her side and smiles at you brattishly and asks for another cigarette. You give it to her. You think she confuses lighting cigarettes with putting them out. You think that’s it. You lay your pack open on the floor beside her, and she leaves it alone. Instead, she asks you for a cigarette every five minutes, without taking one. Soon she lies on her belly, drawing her hem midway up her back, rocking the giant white cheeks of her ass in the sun. She looks up at you, flirting and smiling. You return her looks and nudge the pack with your toe, closer to her. She laughs. You’ve surprised her somehow.

And then she says: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

“What is that?”

H/ellen knocks a cigarette out of the pack.

“Walt Whitman, part-time carpenter.”

You sit up on the edge of the couch, looking down at her face. You don’t know what else to ask. She looks up and licks the air between you.

“Ahhh. There you are. I’ve been looking for you, young man.”

A doctor is standing at H/ellen’s feet.

“Pull down your dress H/ellen. Do you think we all want to see you?”

The doctor pats you on the shoulder and stretches an arm leading to his office down the hall. You follow. As you approach his office you can tell that something is making him uncomfortable. Something is bothering him. You sit in his office and he flips open a file. You can tell he’s not reading it.

“So, so, so.” How twitchy this man is. You see a lot of doctors and you’ve begun to wonder: What on earth do they have in common?

“So, so, so.” He’s trying to say something, but he doesn’t know how. “You’re a painter, huh?”

You milk the painter angle whenever you can, it seems to satisfy something about you.

“Yes.”

“OK, you’re gonna think this is a little odd, but I want your professional opinion on something.”

You squint to picture yourself at an easel, in a paintsmeared smock, with one of those wood things hanging from your thumb. Art history: Cézanne, Polenc, and… and… Walt Whitman. You imagine lifting the back of your smock, flashing your ass at H/ellen, who is your model.

“Sure doc, anything. Shoot.”

“Yeah, so I bought this painting, that one over there.”

You recognize the building in the painting. It’s the Queen St. Mental Health Centre. And it’s painted by Mendelson Joe.

“Yeah, that’s Mendelson Joe, isn’t it?”

The doctor becomes tense again. Your observation is almost too astute.

“Well, I wanted to know if it’s… if you thought, whether you thought it was any good.”

You stand up and square off in front of the painting. You try to raise your hand to your mouth, but the cast clunks against the desk.

“Oh dear!”

You gesture for him to stay seated.

“I’m fine. I’m OK.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“Yeah, it’s good.”

The doctor sits up.

“Really? You think so? I thought so. Sort of… uh… primitive, wouldn’t you say?”

You cough and hold your mouth in a plaster palm.

“Yeah, I like this kind of thing. Sure. I was there.”

The doctor nods seriously. You were there. Oh yes, oh, I see. You were there.

You’re lying. You were in the Clarke Institute.

“Well, good. Everything else is OK? We have you on the medication now, do we?”

You cough again.

“Yes, but I think that the Lorazipam dose is too low and I think I need some Percodan.”

You hold out your hands and they jump involuntarily at the air. You wince and pull your cast to your chest.

“Ah, yes, it’s going to be a rough couple of days for you. I’ll tell the med-girl to double up on that for a while.”

30 No More Zombies

It’s Friday night, so the staff allows the patients to rent a movie and stay up to watch it. The titles patients request are all meant to upset and disturb the nurses. Science Crazed, Phantasm, 2,000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead, Carnival of Souls. The nurse on duty looks at the selection and says: “You don’t think this is funny, do you?”

No one answers; instead, you all look down at her hand, flipping your list against her thigh. Her fingers are yellowed with slick nicotine tips and you look at each other. There is only one smoking room. Where does she smoke? The tiny world of the nurse hiding in the half moons on her fingernails scratches to the surface. This suggests to you, emotionally, negligently, that her people can get away with anything. They would like you to watch Terms of Endearment. You don’t even know how to begin to explain how hateful this movie is.

At the appointed hour she turns off the college basketball game you’re watching and brings a heel down an inch from H/ellen’s face. March Madness. She adjusts the blue of a blue screen with a remote. H/ellen turns her head on the floor and looks at you. She gives the universal sign for being in close proximity to a hated person’s smelly foot. The nurse leaves before the movie begins and it proves unwatchable right from the beginning. Not a fault of the film exactly; the nurse has adjusted the colour up into a spectrum where everyone appears to be wearing huge, flaming life preservers. Jeff Daniels is in more trouble than most of the actors. His character frequently drops his head toward his chest, exposing his face to the charring effects of flame. You each decide silently that the nurse has unwittingly given you the kind of movie you wanted after all. You turn the sound up so loud that the Terms of Endearment are transformed into the Agonizing Screams of Endearment. H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one. You just recycle the ones she doesn’t smoke. She has a beautiful smile. Crazy. All trouble. Never learning.

Just as Jack Nicholson attempts to extinguish the fire covering Shirley MacLaine by driving an ultra-violet car into a white ocean, the nurse comes running across the room. She’s pissed. She turns the television off, looking at no one. She kicks the air over H/ellen and flees the room. The VCR is still running, so it takes a few minutes for people to pull themselves away. When they do, H/ellen and you are left alone to smoke and listen to the movie purring along in its machine.

H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one.

She sits up to grab the cigarette, and instead of lying back down slides over to the coffee table. She looks you straight in the eye as she lifts her little dress up over her hips. She pulls the leg of the table between her legs. You look down quickly and then look up again. She looks down herself, encouraging you to do the same. The foot of the leg is surrounded by her large vagina and she draws it against her flesh by flexing her thighs. She looks back up to you and, while you are looking directly into each other’s eyes, you unbutton the top of your pants and slip down your hand.

You feel for a brief second, Tommy’s laboured breathing. He lays on his back, sleeping, with medication applied to the scrapes on his face and a white sheet pulled tight across his tall chest. He will wake up soon and come to find you. You concentrate on this.

This was exactly twelve years ago. Four days later you will discover a surprising alternative to suicide.

31 Autopsy

In the waiting room of Dr. John Mendez the corpses of a woman and her teenage son are being unwoven from the stiff limbs that have held them through the week. Dr. Mendez lays the bodies out on the floor of an examining room. There are already three other bodies there, stacked on the cushioned table. There is such an abundance of diving board stiffness in the people that surround him that Mendez finds himself performing loose little dances to distinguish himself. He is conscious of not being dead. He is less conscious of the people around him not being alive, and so along with his dancing he’s carrying on conversations with the cadavers.

He jigs down to a squat and pulls blond hair off the youth’s forehead.

“Hello young man.”

Mendez steps around, still in a squat, so that he’s looking across the teenager’s chest.

“Now we have no choice. We’re starting to really get to know one another, aren’t we?”

Mendez places a hand on the boy’s chest.

“You’re a beautiful lad, Doomsday Boy. You’ve backed off a bit from all this, though, haven’t you?”

He lifts the youth’s forearm and his entire upper body comes off the floor.

“I can’t believe that you’re like wood now, Doomsday Boy! Five days ago I said to your mother that little bags of marijuana never killed anyone. And now where is she? There, beside you. What a pair. Like planks of wood! Jesus has left a few carvings for me.”

Mendez pushes the tip of his finger into the hard skin between the boy’s eyebrows.

“I think you were just starting to go crazy with the world — right in here, Doomsday Boy, where your eyebrows are preparing to reach across and join hands. The long Ontario boy, now just a little carving of the rest of the world.”

A telephone rings in the reception area across the hall. Mendez lets it ring three times before tapping the boy’s shoulder with a closed hand and rising to his feet. He counts the other corpses with his eyes. “All you exhausted and serious people. I think I will take a walk to the telephone.”

One week ago the plague of cannibals in Ontario stopped moving. The population that had been crouched in a corner, under the shadow of hands dripping off the walls, with their own arms held protectively over their heads, had been holding their breaths. One week ago the zombies sat down quietly, the spirit of revenge, of murder, slipping from them. As the population exhaled it felt the silly relief of survival. We began to clean our parks and fields of the dead and the near dead. Slowly the province became less self-absorbed.

We discovered that while we were fleeing from vampires a giant in Texas began tossing babies like footballs from a bridge, breaking their little bodies open against the pebbles of a dried riverbed.

The receding hairline of the land continued its steady progress while we were gone and the little black glasses perched on the world’s nose lost some of their effectiveness. If we can accept our recent history, then we can now take a place among the slow cells that muddy the thought of the world.

Dr. John Mendez has been called to the Campbellcroft Secondary School. A makeshift morgue has been set up in the gymnasium, and the doctor is part of a team sent in to organize the dead. Over four thousand bodies have been hastily piled in this refrigerator. Steam climbs out of the limbs and wiggles, like white worms, across cliffs of dead people. The mist becomes dew on the upper lips of faces that are turned toward the steel rafters.

A plywood table sits in a narrow valley, and on it a body is being opened by Dr. Mendez.

“Well, my sleepy little man, this is a famous nap you’re having now, isn’t it?”

Mendez glides four fingers under the flat upper lobe of the lung he’s laid against Les Reardon’s side. He depresses his thumb through the tiled pink of the tissue, squeezing out a black bubble from within.

“Oh dear, these last few breaths didn’t help matters much, did they?”

Mendez lifts the edge of the body, accidentally pushing the lung from the table. He squeezes his hips against the edge, but the organ slips through and swings under the plywood, suspended like a pendulum. The weight of the lung tugs where it’s attached inside the chest cavity and the heart springs up onto the corpse.

“Little monkeys! Come on, get back up here!”

Mendez rests the chain of organs between the arm and the chest.

“Well, you rascal, before I let you go about exploding all over the place I have something to tell you.”

Mendez drags a thumbnail through a burnt crust that covers the shoulders.

“Now listen carefully: I think you must have had an awful fire at your back. And as you were opening your mouth to warn me, the air crawled in and blistered you on the inside.”

Mendez piles the organs back into the torn pocket of the man’s abdomen and lays a clipboard against him. He writes the name and age of the man. Death by smoke inhalation. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something’s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Something gentle, Mendez thinks, something in this place.

“Well, I have to put you back in the fire, but why don’t you carry that little space with you, eh? You tell the flames to burn carefully around it.”

Mendez rolls the table on its wheels down through the valley, bouncing it across the wrists and knuckles that cripple out along the banks. The bodies that have been processed are deposited in the girls’ change room, where a team binds them into groups of six. From there they are transported to an incinerating facility in Pickering. Three teenage girls, in blue gym shorts and slack training bras, pull the body of Les Reardon loose from the slivers that hold him to the gurney. They lower him, face down, onto a plastic sheet. Les shares the sheet with the leather tents of two dead cows. Mendez attempts to back the empty table through the door. One of the girls steps off the sheet, wipes red gruel from her hands onto her gym shorts, and holds the door for the doctor.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are a terrible team. Thank you.”

As he turns a corner around the southern mountain, Mendez notices a dark ledge of scorched heads and shoulders. He parks the gurney beneath the discoloured bodies and steps up onto a back that supports his weight. With a pinching grip that breaks through the blackened skin around the back of a woman’s neck, Mendez attempts to pull the body down. The head tumbles out of its spot, surprising Mendez as it bounces to the ground.

“There are people in bits up here! Blown to pieces! What have we been missing in all this?”

Mendez climbs down and lifts the head onto his table.

“This is that exploding rascal’s fire, I bet.”

He turns the head over and examines a piece of burnt wood embedded in the skull.

“A very loud bomb of some kind went off quite near you, didn’t it?”

Mendez looks up at the spot where the head fell loose. A dark sink of charred bodies. It covers an area halfway up the mountain like the shadow of a cloud.

“Oh dear, a bomb blew up the lot of you.”

This tarred spot of Ontario represents the tiny population of a compound on Scugog Island who had lived out their final days in a highly specialized struggle. They might be conventionally referred to as a type of suicide cult, and they lived as characters crossed somewhere between the Factory of Andy Warhol and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. They had isolated themselves from the rest of the province, behind tall white walls, on top of which swung a battalion of surveying cameras. Within these walls they abandoned depth-of-self as a spiritual corruption and built of themselves a shiny, reflective surface. It was on this gleaming surface, hard to picture in the sweltering heat, that they polished themselves into a supreme medium of contact. The only thing preventing them from achieving unity with the greeting that they were becoming was the fact that they continued to live.

They grew anxious to put their lives behind them, to heave the snake of longing off, to blink clear in a phatic collective, with arms stretched out flat across flat friends in a flat place. The leader, perhaps the flattest of them all, introduced them to the speed of touch, the superiority of skin over skeleton, and taught them to express love by brushing the hair on each other’s arms. The day was fast approaching, skating backwards from the future on a mirror, when they would twin themselves in a “hello” that the universe had been preparing for itself since the beginning. They decided that the best way to achieve this would be through a giant explosion. This day, flat as it was becoming, was pushed ahead by the speed bumps of the tricky weeks preceding it. These speed bumps were caused by another unrelated drama that crept up to, and under the walls of, the compound. This is what the doctor has yet to discover.

Mendez places the glistening blue-black head on the floor to mark the spot. He wants to return here later, to put a story together out of the burnt pieces of people.

“Stay here, little acorn. I’ll take care of you and your friends today, I promise.”

He turns another foot of the mountain and parks the table back in the space where he had found Les Reardon. Mendez has grown tired of recording broken necks, and inspired by the discovery of new causes of death he scans the mound for anyone else who might have died with an intact spinal column.

“Hello, hello, hello! You! Up there. Something new.”

Mendez climbs up to another area of darkened skin. He reaches it quickly with his hill-climbing limbs and slaps a hand on the top of a head. He rotates the head to test the neck and, finding it unbroken, works the body loose like a child’s tooth from baby-pink gums. It surfs down the slope across a runningboard of sloppy necks. Mendez bounds down the hill after it, jumping off hard chests and rigid thighs, losing his footing in the bend of an old man’s back, nearly falling.

Mendez sits on the floor between two outstretched hands. He bends them back under the mountain.

“Trying to grab my wheels, uh?”

He drags the body he followed onto his lap and unsticks the long black hair from its face.

“Oh good heavens! You’re not a burnt man, are you?”

Mendez places his hands on either side of the head and it shakes: No.

“A good neck to sleep with isn’t it?”

Mendez pushes a thumb on the chin, creaking the head down on its rigid neck.

“So the Native man isn’t dying like the others, is he? I can see your friends from here. Chins up, the group of you.”

“Maybe the plague is just after the white ones, what do you think?”

Mendez turns his hand over on the mouth of the dead man.

“You see that? I have brown skin, not so black. Not so much like you either. More like copper, hmm? Maybe that’s why I’m alive now, sitting in your sleeping country. Let’s do a little survey and see.”

Mendez rolls the body to the side and stands stiffly, stretching his back and shaking out his arms.

“Your country reminds me of Columbia, do you know that? Sure. All these soft hills and perfect valleys. Not as green, but the same God working out his favourite shapes.”

Mendez turns and looks to a particularly steep rise to the south.

“So I will look for the colour of coffee and we’ll test our theory, hmmm?”

Mendez walks past his table and stares into the bluing flesh and scrub land of open mouths and clenched hands.

“There are not very many black people in this part of Ontario, are there?”

Mendez walks east up the wending river floor. He notices for the first time that climbing ropes are draped across a mound piled against the long back wall. He approaches a rope and turns it out from under the elbow that has been used to anchor it. He looks down at his feet.

“Oh! Oh! There we are! A good black skin!”

Mendez goes down on his knees and counts heads — eleven in all. He turns a hand over, extending a finger to rub the bright pink of the palm.

“Oh my. All the way from Nairobi by the look of you. Look at what has happened to you.”

Mendez lifts the back of the woman’s head. It flips out of his hand and turns backwards, twisting the flesh of her neck. Mendez touches the other heads, lightly tossing them on their broken vertebrae.

“Ah well. Back to work, Mendez.”

Mendez stands and, as he strolls back to his table, notices that he can now spot several dark bodies, the remains of black people, here and there across the smooth crests and pitched surface of the corpses.

“OK, you’re next. I’ll need some help with you, I think.”

Mendez removes a cloth from a shelf under the table and brushes the surface.

“Girls! I need a girl over here! Hello!”

A teenage girl with long raven hair comes around the base of a cliff. The white of her training bra is leopard spotted with blood and her white gym socks are thick with the black glue of a hundred leaking bodies. She flips the hair from her cheeks and sniffs at the back of her hand. Her eyes are a beautiful green fire, and she squints them at the doctor as she approaches, disapproving and hurt. The doctor is turned away from her and she notices that his shoulders are raised slightly in the ragged act of emotion.

“Hello? Doctor? Are you OK?”

Mendez remains turned away. He lowers his shoulders and tries to take deep breaths that catch in his rising chest.

“I’m having a little cry. It’s not like there isn’t good reason.”

The girl hangs her hair back over her face.

“I have them every so often, and you should too. I knew some of these people quite well, and the others, the others are not living anymore either, you see?”

Mendez flattens his hands on his wet cheeks.

“So let’s not be seagulls, eh? Let’s cry every so often.”

The girl hangs her head under a veil of hair. She brings a hand up to her face and lightly bites the tip of a finger. She looks up and Mendez sees that she is frightened of him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying most of the time. Please ignore me. How about giving me a hand putting this big man on the table, hmmm?”

They lift the man between them and before she leaves she pats Mendez once on the back of his upper arm. He looks to her, smiling, and she’s gone — west, toward the change room.

The man that Mendez is about to cut into has lungs filled with cinders. Like the bodies that surround him in the mountain, this man represents the speed bumps that caught fire at the walls of the suicide compound. In the weeks that the cult was preparing to die, a Native reservation that abutted its property was preparing to take back possession of the land. The Natives banged on drums up and down the wall. Some performed traditional rites and dances, while others sat to the side with dull cloths pulled over their faces and rifles bouncing against their knees to keep time. Within the walls the suicide cult kept postponing the moment they would die. They were offended by the Natives’ crazed defiance of a superficial life. Everyone wanted to die on his or her own land, but the suicide cult believed that they were the only people who understood this land. Its flatness. Its perfect lack of depth. The little pouches of dust and bone that did, in fact, exist beneath the compound floor were beastly fetishes of the world’s terrible love of things beneath the surface. Depth of feeling. Depth of belief. Depth of character. A place built beneath us to hide in. Hateful repositories.

The suicide cult kept putting off the day, until finally they snapped. Filling empty drums with fuel and twist-tying together sticks of dynamite one afternoon, they prepared to die. The same afternoon three groups from the reserve crawled through the hidden entrances of three sweat lodges near the southeast corner outside the compound. Then the explosion punched the sky with a single orange fist that drove upward into a furry black glove. The heat melted the plastic coat of the forest, and the rocks, once cool in their light green pyjamas, broke into blisters. Inside the twiggy domes, the speed bumps of worship, men and women poured cedar tea on glowing boulders that hissed in a pit at their feet. They continued the ritual, oblivious to the flames that were curling in from the roof as they systematically honoured everything in existence. Long before the invisible ash and tiny red pins destroyed them they managed to exceed their bodies enough to miss entirely the moment when they expired. It will be centuries before one of them taps another and says, “I can’t help but notice, but… I think… we have, apparently we’ve been dead for some time.” His companion will look across, in the manner of spirits, and reply, “Good Lord, you’re right. I’ve been so busy…”

When the island exploded Les Reardon was sitting on a tiny peninsula of flat stones. He had given himself over fully to the energy of his creeping delusions. He held his son carefully to his chest and smiled the smile that was, at last, important to him. Looking up into the sky or whatever it was, he said, “So that was the world, after all.”

Les felt the heat at his back before hearing the crack of the fireball. He tossed his son into the tiny waves of Lake Scugog. As he lay flat, dying of heat on the flat stones, Les saw a tiny form surface and lift his son’s head above the water.

These hands will take the baby who has been borne so hastily by an autobiography and drag him to the bottom of the lake, where he can live out a life that is now so very few pages away.

Mendez folds the flat, wet pillow of poisoned lung back into the man’s chest. He wipes his throat, smearing a juice of connective tissue and cinder across his Adam’s apple. He lifts the back wheels of the table over a bag of broken vertebrae that he’s been collecting and he steers the big man’s body down the path.

“Girls! Girls!”

The change room door is held open by the girl with long black hair. Mendez can see the other two inside, sitting on the smooth wooden benches that line the back wall. They are grinding half-smoked cigarettes out with the tips of their running shoes.

“I think this fellow is my limit for the day. I’m due for a cry now. I suggest you do the same, ladies.”

Mendez nods to the bent cigarettes on the floor and pulls his mouth down in a way that gently suggests that he isn’t quite accepting. As the door closes the girls jump to hide a pack of cigarettes and sweep the butts under the sheet. Mendez swings the door back open in the timing of all adults; without acknowledging the cover-up in progress he says, “I can give you young ladies a ride home if you’d like. It’s getting dark now. I’ll be outside.”

Mendez sits in his car, waiting for the girls. He watches a military vehicle being loaded with corpses in the teachers’ parking lot.

“My heavens, suspicious behaviour looks so pointless today. Go ahead, little army, hide your dirty deeds! You’ll hold the world together with your secrets, I’m sure.”

Mendez notices that the muddy bodies being put in the long van have all been shot in the head. He recognizes the body of a woman being swung like a sack. She is tossed high up into the back of the vehicle.

“That hits hard. Oh dear, why did they shoot poor Ellen Peterson?”

The rear doors of the car open and close on the three girls who have piled together in the back.

“I have to have a moment here, ladies. You can join me. The body of our lovely reeve is now in transit to a final resting place.”

The three girls lean forward and look over the arm Mendez has slung from the passenger headrest. Two of the girls watch the men, with guns hanging across their backs, as they leap up into the cab of the truck. The truck rambles out of the light that’s mounted behind the backboard of a basketball hoop, and it fades into where the light is diminishing under the road dust.

The third girl is staring with horror at the long hairs on Mendez’s arm. She will have a nightmare tonight about these wild grey wires and the soft wrinkled pad of skin that droops off the elbow into the dark of the back seat. Mendez pulls his arm down and puts the car in gear. He rolls his face quickly into a raised shoulder to clear his eyes of tears.

“Well, ladies, let’s go home.”