Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  “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 imbedded 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 th
e 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.”

  PART II

  NOVEL

  Yeah, they’re dead all right — they’re all messed up.

  — Sheriff, in Night of the Living Dead

  1

  Biopsy

  In the beginning was a virus.

  Its shape towered over all other early life.

  The earliest carnivore, this virus slurped at the rim over which every animated thing first appeared. It recombined bitten elemental life in its cheek, releasing it back into the atmosphere in stringy vomit. These were the little dishes it invented for itself to make dinner more interesting, and life, thus interrupted, became the virus’s menu, little bio-copy houses, walking self-perpetuating delivery services, DNA was born. Living things were doomed to repeat their second step throughout eternity, into waiting mouths, never to know what direction they were actually spilling towards, condemned to contemplate forever, to nearly recall, the absolute independence that a third step would have brought.

  The virus farmed the organisms into complexity, playing in this system like Disney World, reddening and pinking and bluing and dulling everything. The organisms evolved to the point where they comprehended themselves as copy machines, and almost instantly ecosystems began to dry up. The virus, fearful of this hostile extension — mechanical reproduction —jumped from the imperilled species into the imperious one. First, it adapted itself to life inside computer memory. In the year 1996 the virus finally came home.

  The virus had hid silently for decades up in the roofs of adjectives, its little paws growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there; then, sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior workings of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the paradigms, jamming selection with pointed double fangs. A terrible squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across horizontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Radical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a fortune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the ground.

  The plague first manifests itself in the infected person as a type of déjà vu, with an accompanying aphasia. Everything that happened presented itself as alrea
dy happened. This infinitely complicated things. For as soon as the person adjusted, understanding that this sensation was merely a symptom of the plague, his or her understanding slipped backward into the already happened. Each realization had to be doubled against itself into becoming understood next: an impossible therapy to maintain. The present tense was a slippery slope to anyone in remission. The “now” became a deepening lesion, and from it rose the smell of this new sickness.

  The disease developed in terrifying stages. First, the patient panicked and then sat stunned, silent, in a kind of exile. The person would eventually slip into a depression and exhibit ghastly physical symptoms. Typically the tongue would hang out, becoming dry and swollen, stiffening against the chin. This usually marked the end of the person’s exile from the living.

  The advanced stages of the disease involved, astonishingly, revenge. This revenge was not the type we might recognize; it was not tied to an emotion or a desire, but to the other: a symptom of the disease. The disease is commonly referred to as Acquired Meta-structural Pediculosis. Or, AMPS.

  The patients at this advanced stage turn into violent zombies. Cannibals. They knock people to the ground and bite away at their mouths. They devour skin and flesh, throat and tongue. Finally both the AMPS victim and the AMPS victim’s victim are destroyed by a single violent whip of the head that breaks their necks.

  A carnival barker with a blond moustache wicked up either side of his nose is drawn in a panel by a cartoonist, beside a tall open mouth. Smoke curls up over the mouth’s giant upper lip. Greg closes this page, the last one, and he checks the cover price before sliding it behind the next comic on the shelf that’s part of this series.

  2

  City of Feeling

  Their heads sway above their shoulders on Queen Street.