Pontypool Changes Everything (23 page)

“
OK
, you little freak. Let me give you a hand. Be careful. It can probably still bite.”

The children prop the zombie up on the seat across from Jimmy’s skeleton in progress. Jimmy adjusts her broken body so that she is staring directly at the skull. Her face has been frozen in a scream with purple cheeks. Her tiny arrow of a tongue sits squatting in her open mouth, deep in her fat throat, preventing the scream from breaking out. Jimmy notices this and thinks that she might choke. He slaps her hard across
the eyes. Her tongue unplugs her lungs. With a blast of breath she sprays the skull across from her with bile. Maggots in the crisp black corners of shorn tendons wriggle and turn away, vomit stinging in their mouths. A look of surprise lights up the zombie’s face when she breathes in. As she breathes out, through buzzing wet lips, she tilts her head to the side. Curious. Jimmy begins tapping the frame of the skeleton, catching the maggots that drop in an orange Tupperware bowl. He slides the half-full bowl under the table and tips it against the woman’s ragged leg.

Julie approaches the teenage zombie again. This time quickly, relying on his confusion to give her an opportunity. She strides directly up to him and whacks the blade of the hatchet through his forehead, burying it in his zombie brain. She releases the hatchet and lets the boy fall. He lies still at her feet, the weapon hanging off his head like a festive hat. Julie pushes down on his cranium with her foot, and with a yank that squawks the bone she removes the hatchet.

By the time the sun sets on their garden the children are safely indoors. They take turns bathing in the large sink, towelling each other’s little body with soft, careful bats. They slip into the light summer dresses that they have pulled carefully over the heads of dead women and scrubbed clean. Jimmy wears a short violet frock with wide straps and a tiny white pocket. Julie wears a long, black cotton dress to bed. She lies on her back while her brother traces the outline of a stranger’s hand on her belly. There is, in fact, a hand inside her, cooked and crumbling. He smiles at her. She is his one and only.
She closes her eyes and feels the stranger’s hand turn over in digestive juices, fingering the tight aperture at the base of her stomach.

Through a window near the ceiling, Jimmy can see the starry sky and milky light of nightfall. He lifts his hand off Julie’s belly and slips two fingers through the strap that’s fallen down his arm and draws it up his smooth shoulder. He drops his hands on his knees and sits crouched beside his sister on the bed. He watches and listens. Quiet. A rope groans in the dark. Silence. A moth lands. A grey owl rotates its head toward the moon reflected in the window. The room is so quiet that Jimmy can hear the floor lying still in the dark. A wolf howls, across the river and far up the hill. Jimmy listens. The room swings once, turning wildly in the pitch black, and catches itself high in the bones of the small boy’s ear.

The only thing as universal as the experience of power is the experience of hunger. The empty stomach, like an orange lantern, casts light off its panels onto the dripping walls of a cave. Illuminated there are directions, instructions and recipes, carved and smudged in the stone, potato and potato habitat. The empty stomach turns its fierce light and obscure chemicals into a camera, developing maps in its juices, even going as far as to slip a photograph into the artist’s hand. At the cave entrance the painter stands, rubbing his or her tummy with the map, saying, “Hey, I know where that is.”

When Greg arches his back, his Higher Power shimmies the man’s body up tighter between the fork of his legs and squeezes tightly to secure the gain. The
HP
stifles the liquid in Greg’s throat with a hand cupped over his mouth. Greg’s body relaxes and the
HP
presses his lips in the soft hollow of his neck. Greg feels the warmth of the lips and they stimulate a sizzle of digestive juices at the bottom of his heart. The two men lie this way, like a long caduceus, on the driveway, writhing occasionally to feel more directly the consolation of each other’s body.

Greg tries to open his eyes but finds a lid pinned shut by a thumb. With his one eye, a tall blue cone that skates across a giant white planet, he observes the trees and sky above him, eager to see changes, signs of
encouragement. A birch tree flies upward to his left. Its white trunk is scored with lesions where the wet rubble of its interior has burst through. Its trunk blackens further up and branches straighten into slick spears. At this height, the furthest that Greg can focus, bright green lights wrap the air around the deadly tree. Beyond, the leaves checker the sky, filling in the squares in a grid, sharing their presence evenly with ice blue. Greg can see in each distant screen, clear and livid with detail, little blue manic dramas. A blue policeman falls off a cliff, a child wiping his nose, a woman in a chair, a wrestler snaps his shoulder straps, a picture of Jesus so cold he freezes, a pimple squeezes, hair is teased, a sneeze is sneezed, a breeze leaves, the easy … eases … keezes … cheezes … breezes …

The
HP
lifts his lips away from Greg’s neck and breathes through his mouth. The hot breath chills a patch of saliva and makes Greg shiver. He feels the breath like steam tickling the short hairs at the base of his neck. The
HP
slips a finger into Greg’s mouth and the taste of salt fills it with saliva. Greg sucks the finger hard, flicking his tongue on the crease that marks the first digit. He probes the crease until he raises taste buds across the finger pad. He tries to turn his body, to find something more, but the
HP
tightens his grip. In this small struggle Greg feels his cock suddenly pump against his jeans, filling his crotch with hot fluid. The pleasure spreads down his legs and past him. Greg opens his mouth and pants quick breaths around the finger, cooling it so that when he closes his mouth the finger is icy.

There are seven valves articulating Greg’s digestive system and they throb and spit along the empty string that connects them. He is starving to death. But mostly he is dehydrating. The skin on his body sits up stiffly where the
HP
has held it. There is too much friction against the drying fibres of muscle for the skin to slide back into place. Systems of thin, grey wrinkles show where Greg’s Higher Power has tugged and prodded him, instilling peace and courage against the coming death: body insulating body.

Greg’s vision has become strange to him, the mucous membranes have retreated into dry puckers, pulling his eyeballs back deep into their sockets. The act of focusing is becoming impaired by pain and what he cannot see with his eyes is compensated for by the drying pelt of his brain. The scenes of his addiction are being played out by leather dolls in a six-inch by six-inch shooting gallery. He turns a doll over and inspects a seam. His own hair, now stiff blond, bristles out between the stitches. He replaces the doll and shrugs, “I’m dying. It’s so odd. I’m so strange.”

Time is passing quickly, frosting its boots in the night. In the morning an icy dew stings its cracked lips. At a height of four hundred feet, three turkey vultures hang off an immense updraft and float downward in a wide circle.

Over the next few days the two men lie in the gravel and weeds. They hold each other, and occasionally one of them has episodes of anguish that cause him to twist in the arms of the other. The episodes subside under the soothing hands and calm whispers of the Higher Power.

In time Greg does die. His Higher Power kneels at his side and crosses the teenager’s arms, lifting the hair from his young, pale face. He stands and looks down at the body that is ruined and vacant and he mouths a short prayer. He walks away from the body without looking back and climbs, in clothes now filthy and tattered, toward the highway. At the side of the road he puts out his thumb. He expects a chariot to descend from a cloud to pick him up. He’s surprised when an old red pick-up truck turns the corner and comes to a dusty stop on the shoulder just ahead of him.

It isn’t possible to grow tired of a stream. A stream is a permanently exciting medium. Stones jiggle in its bed and roots laugh at its edges. The sun shoots Popsicles at a stream. The clouds lay soft, damp towels on its banks. And animals return from the stream shivering with a hundred rainbows weaving in their wet fur.

And the fish.

The fish are different. The fish are always different. In this stream the fish were introduced as minnows through the mouths of metal tubes that dipped below the surface. As adults they return to the precise place of their birth to spawn. They battle like charioteers through the cold water, peeling back their pretty bodies, grimacing with the effort so that their faces look like bullets. And when they arrive home they impale themselves on the sharp metal tips of pipes. By the hundreds they drive their bodies straight onto these stakes, packing the hollow with the bruised flesh of their throats and the frozen bridges of their noses. Throughout the summer aggressive water beetles curve over the openings in military anger. They extract the fibres of meat with barbed toes, feeding it up into their little nightmare faces. The following spring a glistening black chain mail lines the stream, darkening the bottom, where exhausted trout climb along, blind and proud.

By the fall Julie’s belly has begun to bell outward and Jimmy’s body is springing in frog-like leaps over one
pubic hurdle after another. By November his hand is huge and he splays it over Julie’s swollen abdomen, marvelling at its strength.

After five weeks the embryo looks like an ear, or a deflated crab claw, or an oyster. The world presses its face against the meat of the uterine wall, blinking its eyes, surprised that the embryo is in the process of looking like anything at all. This cognitive reality, that it always appears as something else, will dog the little omelette all its life.

At a party in the suburbs a teenage boy lifts his lips from a flaming bong, and when the smoke clears he pulls back a blond bang from his eyes and says: “The stages of a fetus are exactly the same as the stages of evolution. First it’s, like, a single cell, right? Like an amoeba. Then it’s a fish, then an amphibian. Then it, like, crawls up onto the land and grows little prehistoric kangaroo legs. And then its tail disappears and it’s like a tiny monkey.” He seals off the glass pipe again and draws in loudly through bubbling water. The girl is amazed by this.

During the fifth month the fetus is listening. It shudders happily in an enclosed world fed by maternal blood. In Julie’s case the maternal blood has a high concentration of protein.
From human flesh:
the chewy muscles of zombies that she has ambushed near her front door.

The boy exhales a dripping cloud of smoke across the girl’s chest: “No way, man, if, like, a brother and sister conceive a baby, then it’s usually weak and can’t fight off childhood diseases and, it’s like the worst for the
species. So it’s, uh, like part of our genetic make-up that we don’t have sex with our siblings.” The girl reaches for the bong. “Yeah, not without a condom anyway.”

Jimmy lifts a pelvic bone to his face and lines up his eyes in the hollow scoops that form a natural mask. Two wide blades of dry bone curve over his head like a tall decorative helmet. He wiggles his tongue lewdly and crosses his eyes. Julie laughs and flicks wet raspberry from the rim of a bowl in her lap onto her brother. He slaps the berry as it strikes his chest and he squeezes the juice through his fingers. He gives out a birdlike cry of anguish. She admires his handsome face as he pretends to die, still holding the tall mask to his closed eyes.

While the girl sucks deeply, filling the glass tube with thick white smoke, the boy pushes down on his crotch with the heel of his hand: “And it’s also bad to eat people. Because, well, you know, aside from being sick and everything, it weakens us if we do it, ‘cause it crushes the immune system. And anyway, it’s genetic that we don’t, ‘cause if we could we would’ve long ago when we were starving through the winter. And the only survivor would be some fat pig, and we would have died off that first year!” The girl feels a light-headed swirl of connection leading her to some conclusion or other.

After the first snowfall the pregnant couple stay inside most of the time. They conserve their energy and focus on the coming of their child. This is also the beginning of a season-long food shortage. Besides a scarcity of fruits and vegetables, fewer zombies come wandering near their home. So they mete out carefully
the food that they do have, carefully rationing out the zombie flesh.

As his sister becomes less mobile Jimmy begins to forage out in the newly fallen snow for easily visible and trackable wildlife. An abundance of rabbits crisscross their property, and Jimmy spends hours falling in the snow behind them, throwing rocks at them, and spraining his ankles in their doorways. He returns late in the morning to Julie, empty handed and surly. As the weeks progress and they begin to hate the sight of each other, Jimmy pretends he’s going hunting and sits out of view at the picnic table, shivering in the cold just to keep away from his sister’s icy glare. Julie sits at the stove, wearing a zombie’s trenchcoat, craving another human being, anyone who speaks, who isn’t mute and stupid.

They survive the winter this way, occasionally patching together an understanding that their mutual hostility is born of their hard life together. On some winter nights, in the deep silence of the deep snow that surrounds them, they hold each other and accept each other with hands that stroke kindly, remembering. The spring will bring them back. The spring will bring new life.

And it does. With the first thaw Jimmy manages to kill his first rabbit. He stands in the doorway swinging it proudly by the ears as Julie applauds with her tired arms. He reaches for a knife above the bench to skin their dinner. Julie feels a strange clench yank at her body from below.

Every version of the birth of a child is always lacking something. Neither a satisfactory miracle nor a base
torment, childbirth is only one of the thousands of aggressive events that never actually occur in people’s lives. It is enough of something, however, to put everyone on alert. And Julie and Jimmy are no exception.