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.”
Pontypool Changes Everything Page 5