Pontypool Changes Everything

Tony Burgess PONTYPOOL CHANGES EVERYTHING A Novel

For my girls Camille and Rachel

with gratitude to Bruce McDonald

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rachel Jones, who makes everything possible. I love you.

Everyone at ECW and Shadow Shows. My brother Bruce McDonald.

Griffin, who laughs at Camille. And Camille, who loves boobs-stickin’-out Barbie.

Importantly, for support: Jane, Kate, Tim, Barb, Andrew, Kelly, AJ, Jesse, Krista, Susan, David, Pia, John & Edith, Pat, Bruce, Erica, Paige, Emily, Jake, and my dear mother, Audrey, gone now but remembered fiercely.

And thank you to superheroes Derek McCormack and Malcolm Ingram.

Michael Holmes for insisting we do this and, as always, for being willing to re-friend me on the way down and the way up.

PART I AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This is a love song for John and Leisha’s Mother.
It wasn’t easy. I might not write another.

— Chris Knox

That night I had terrible dreams I was killing people. When I awoke it took some serious self-examination to convince myself that I was not repressing real acts of murder. So completely vivid was my sense of guilt that I felt nothing short of running through a full account of my life could provide me with the peace of mind I needed to fall back asleep. In spite of the three hours I spent combing over the details, I have, to this day, a very persistent certainty that hidden inside me is the revolting knowledge of days when I wasn’t quite myself. I now suspect that my inexplicable bouts of exhaustion are due to the massive effort of keeping those days behind me.

1 The Nervous Population

Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of Ontario’s thinnest winds. Cold as a needle and far too complicated to ever leave the ground, these picks of air snap at fetlocks, blackening the legs of horses. The anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears across the ice of a frozen pool. It feels the behaviour of more famous systems and is consumed by the complexity of its origins, breaking into mad daggers and splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze, skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their crazy minds and begin to make plans.

On the shore of the pool the other horses, ageing and brown, unglue their heels from the burning snow and align their bodies with the grain of the sun, counting the minutes, eight in all, until the first warming rays fall from the star’s coat and drape across a horse’s back, raising its withers and bathing its dark crest. The horses of leather and bone and cheek and thigh climb towards an open gate in the cedar fence that surrounds the pool. On the southern post claps the fat orange mitt of a man in a bulging white coat. In his other hand he swivels a bucket, clanging a metal dish against its sides.

The horses, five of them, roll in a line through the gate and are swallowed by the south shadow of the barn before they disappear into an open door. The man closes the gate and, swinging the bucket, follows a shallow gully of mud wending through the snow to a beige truck parked at the side of the road. He walks around the vehicle kicking the heavy ice that juts out, like teeth, from its underside until it loosens and falls, intact and old, onto the soft shoulders of the road. After circling the truck twice, swiping and kicking at random, he tries the tread of his boot in the access step and climbs into the driver’s seat.