by Tony Burgess
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 rearview 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. Negli
gible 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 moustache, 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.
★