Pontypool Changes Everything

by Burgess, Tony

  An optical effect is emerging. An illusion, one whose fidelity grows on the HP, as he creates second and third arrowheads. The field begins to flow outward in waves from the suddenly motionless platform, carrying buoys on waves that roll back from the distance. A hollow sky pulls at this figure, as he leans, in his fantasy, against the bailing chute. He raises the gloved fingers of his hand and traces an imagined coastline, as far away as the white morning moon, now a perfect pressure, light against his palm. The HP feels that he may die for seeing the field this way, and he very nearly cries. There is consciousness breaking in the soil, other people’s consciousness. A curl falling across Greg’s cheek appears in a quick spindrift of dust coming off a stone in the mud. As long as I can see the moment everything changes. As long as the HP can see the moment when everything changes, then everything in its vying is as good as home. And eventually, in an infinite cross-current of sadness and longing, every weak, blinking kindness is restored. And then, seconds later, lost. The HP feels for the first time in his short life, the millions of years it takes to produce a single, brief moment of passion.

  At noon the tractor drops into neutral and Jackson jumps down. He turns off the baler and the HP realizes that in some way he has been sustained all morning by its roar. His arms throb, and his abdomen twitches. He looks down to make sure his body isn’t as huge as it feels. He feels like a perfect giant, gleaming and hard, with fingers too strong to move. Jackson stands beside the platform and removes his cap. He squats and presses a palm through the short grass.

  “Ah-yeh. Don’t want it wet.”

  The table is laid out with oversized plates and bowls steaming with multiple helpings of a variety of foods. A dozen steaks are bleeding down on each other beside a serving tray of ribs so tender that meat falls from the bones when the HP pulls back his chair. He fills his plate with slick, hot carrots and ice-cold beets. Harley, who has been cleaning the mow all morning, is watching television with his sister. Jackson stands, straddling the metal strip dividing the kitchen from the living room, watching the small black-and-white set. A young woman is holding a microphone under the chin of a man in a naval uniform.

  “Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh. Don’t want rain.”

  After lunch Harley helps Jackson on the baler and the HP is sent to the mow to wait for them to return from the field with the first load of hay. A neighbour was busy stacking bales on the truck while they ate lunch. The HP watches Harley trailing after Jackson across the field. He feels a drain of energy caused by the task of digestion. The HP walks slowly toward the barn. The younger man is picking up stones that his father kicks from the ground. He sails them through the air to bounce off an island of rocks in the middle of the field. The HP can see Jackson’s shyness even from this distance: his resignation and defiance. He’s a tightly packed, complex man who frowns when people laugh and seems never to have exhaled in his life.

  The barn is dark inside, with shafts of white sunlight turning orange on the floor. The HP climbs a ladder of planks nailed across six-by-twelve uprights. At the top he has to jump across an opening of a metre and a half onto a loft. A window at the peak of the roof opens out onto the field where Jackson and Harley are working. The black rubber of a conveyor belt obscures the view. The HP sits on a bale of hay and waits. The mow is a trap of nearly unbreathable air, where waves of heat rise, cooking the atmosphere through stale hay into a gas that holds the oxygen near the roof in a dark poison. The HP is having difficulty breathing, and when the conveyor rattles to life it takes him three attempts before he can stand without support. He can see the first bale climbing towards him, and he lays his shaking hands on the edge of the conveyor belt, taking its vibrations up his arms.

  He believes that this bale will fall against him and drive him to the floor. He knows that they vary in weight, from about forty to seventy pounds, and that the range represents what is possible and what is now, in this strength-sapping fire, clearly impossible. The bale teeters at the top on a brief fulcrum and falls against the HP, driving him to the floor. He kicks his legs across the sliding chaff and rolls the bale, end for end, to a corner of the mow. The first tier can go like this. The second has to be lifted. So does the third. The fourth has to be heaved. The fifth has to be built by arms that push upward, straining and, hopefully, the HP thinks, numb. At least I’m alone up here, no one can see me struggle.

  Within an hour he has completed the first wall. He has begun to cough the cough that he’s been warned about. His lungs are skipping uncontrollably on a tripwire of chaff that is pulled taut inside them. He sputters up a gluey fluid, speckled yellow, and he wipes his burning lips in the black acid that coats his forearms. The second wall seems to go quicker and he feels a muscle in his back break free to dominate his dying arms. The new muscle is a bright and powerful sensation, equal to the ruin it compensates for, and when he straightens he feels it push against him, tripping a series of recoiling muscles, retrieving his arms to his sides and cracking his thighs.

  As he steps over the foundation of his third wall the HP notices the light in the mow shift from orange flame to purple. The conveyor stops suddenly and squeaks backward horribly before settling. He feels the silence as he did this morning, as a barrier against sensation dropping, and gravity returns to his limbs, pulling him down towards the floor. Above his head the rattle of rain stones up off the aluminum roof. This sound, cool and falling from far away, intensifies the heat and deafness in the mow.

  From within the barn below him: “Ah-right!”

  The HP makes the jump across to the ladder, floating almost as he climbs down. He feels the rungs in his hands as empty spaces, their surfaces held from his palms by bruises.

  The haying isn’t finished, and the rain means they won’t resume for several days. A barn full of wet hay will eventually explode.

  The dinner table is twice as laden and the HP finds himself eating smaller portions. He eats alone. Harley has showered and sped off in the car towards town to drink, and Jackson is having a beer himself, sitting in a reclining chair. His daughter is colouring in a book on the floor in front of the television. Dolly is standing by the dishwasher with a long wooden spoon in her hand. She is looking through the house. It seems to the HP that she’s calculating. First, she looks to Jackson, then to the dog’s dish, then over to a fly banging against the window screen. She taps the spoon three times quickly and jumps visibly when she notices the HP looking at her. She recovers by smiling and tilts a bowl of greens toward him.

  He returns the smile and says, “No, thank ya kindly, ma’am.”

  She continues smiling and looks to her husband, who has now fallen asleep in the reclining chair.

  That night the HP cannot sleep. He lies on the lower bunk, staring up into the dark. There is no space heater’s glow and the room is only present in its strong smells. He is picturing the people he shares the house with. Quiet, strong and beautiful. Jackson’s shyness and his intimate game with the sky. Harley’s coltish grin and addiction to showers. And Dolly. Dolly’s strange sight. She confers something with it. She sees. What?

  The Higher Power decides he’ll get up and wander through the house a bit. Listening. He gets to the upper floor and finds himself tiptoeing down the hall.

  I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t.

  He stands in front of the master bedroom door and listens. The toy tractor of Jackson’s snore purrs. The HP turns and notices a soft light beneath the daughter’s door.

  He presses his hand against it, and the door falls open.

  She is sitting on the edge of the bed facing the wall. In a voice like a snapping twig she says, “Now what?”

  AFTERWORD

  When we began to look at putting out a new edition of this book, my editor and friend Michael Holmes asked me if I wanted to change anything. It hadn’t occurred to me that that would be part of the deal. Change it. I dug through some bookshelves to find a copy and cracked it open. Would I change anything? Really? As I read through the first few pages I realized th
at, no, I wouldn’t change anything — I’d change everything. It is not the book I would write today. I’m not the person who wrote this book. I remember him. He had just graduated with a degree in semiotics, which is to say he was insufferably preoccupied with literary malformations. He didn’t actually expect anyone to read it and he held this to be the book’s best virtue. He wanted to magnify the least recognizable parts of his thoughts and feelings. Not just a sketch book, but something far, far less. He wanted to write an “instead,” or an “in case.” “Instead” of a first novel. “In case” one day there might be something to say. “In case” I ever decide to write a book. It’s a place where a book might have been written. And so, and this is the aggravation of the book, and, indeed, the arrogance of the damn thing, it didn’t have to ever be a good one. When I read it and think, oh no, you shouldn’t have done that, and this part can’t work like that, I have to remember, it never really guarded itself against “bad” or “wrong” choices. And so, now that I have been asked to write this afterword, I realize it has to be an apology, not for the book, which can’t be helped, but for that fact that I was unfaithful to its first virtue: I have asked you to read it, and now, sitting here at the end, I am telling you that it might be a mistake that you did.

  The process of turning this into a film, which is the impatient opposite of everything the book thinks it is, brings me closer, alas, to the writer I am today. In the ten or so years leading up to the script Bruce would finally shoot, I wrote, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, dozens of scripts. In fact, now that it is done, I am still writing sequels. The irony of Pontypool, for me, is that it isn’t the thing I wrote in case I wrote; it’s the only thing I ever write.The film bears little resemblance to the novel. How could it? There is a long line of former producers to the project who argued against my involvement, but, though I often suspected they were right, I think in the end I was the right person, because no one had a lower regard for this infuriating book than myself. I felt great energy in tossing the book aside. I wanted something new. Something that worked. Something like work.

  The first day of shooting was completely harrowing for me. I had been re-writing for years and had grown quite used to the luxury of always getting another shot. I think after years of Guided by Voices addiction I had developed Bob Pollard syndrome: if you don’t like this one, I got four thousand more in a suitcase under my bed. Sketches, loose wet pages and photos. The lake. Plenty more where they come from. But when Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle stood there, heads full of memorized lines and feet firmly on their marks, I knew that, marvelously and terribly, sometimes things are finished. In the mornings I would go over the day’s lines and grow frantic that they were awful — because of course they were. Every line is always awful. And then I’d trip and bounce around the set, all the busy people who didn’t know how badly the script was failing them, and find Bruce, who I could never tell this to. I’d seek out Stephen and Lisa who were enjoying the script far too much to be of any use. The pro­ducers on the other hand were so superstitious of uncertainty that I think they avoided me with cat-like sense. And then Bruce would call “action” and it was too late, and silence fell and everyone started to focus. Focus! Focus is the last thing we need. We need blurry and unknown and unfinished. We need palimpsest and stick figures and many, many more meetings. I stood there, clammy and guilty and waiting for someone, anyone, to realize how desperately we needed a re-write.Then the scene began, a kind of unassuming feeling to the dialogue. It seemed natural and I watched as these two people began their day. Pouring coffee. A little chit-chat. And this was it. By some strange and miraculous process, in spite of the claw marks across the page, these two actors had finished it. It was a thing. It was people on a specific day. People who really had no idea what was coming. This was not what I thought I had written at all — this was actually very good. I relaxed and drew myself up. I was the writer and this was the good movie he had written. Just then one of the PAS walked by me and out of the corner of his mouth he said to the prop person, “They let the writer on the set?” It was meant to be funny, but it’s a cliché I found myself embodying: a destructively self-conscious child in a room of shopworn adults.The shoot went quickly and I did rewrite daily as it turned out; in fact, I rewrote the ending the night before we shot it, perhaps because I was getting comfortable with the idea that no matter what I wrote there was a company of fine people invested in making it work. For a writer that is a massive advantage. Years of fighting and flirting and arguing and despairing had somehow transformed into a giant tent of people co-operating with an idea. A tremendously humbling sensation and, looking back, a striking refutation of that book I wrote back there. The book you just read.

  After seeing the film assembled for the first time and feeling great relief that it wasn’t as bad as all that, I leaned over to Lisa Houle, who I was nuts over, and whispered, “Well, thank Christ, now I never have to watch it again.”

  Later, at a party for some event, Lisa sought me out. She had been worried, she explained, that I didn’t like the film. I was quite alarmed by this. I did like the film. I loved her in it. In fact — and this is another odd fact about filmmaking — you have these momentary raptures about other people. Stephen McHattie is a shaman to me. Bruce McDonald is a shaman to me. I asked Lisa why she thought this? She reminded me of what I had said to her at the screening. She looked hurt. I smiled. Actors. Sheesh.

  “Oh darlin’, you should know I never say anything I can’t take back later.”