by Tony Burgess
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. Pet
erson 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.