Pontypool Changes Everything

Three yachts set sail from Port Credit Harbour and are sunk by a coast guard vessel that has, up to this point, been firing on the seagull population. A young captain holds up his head, like a bust of Beethoven, in the pocket of air inside the ship’s bow.

A four-year-old girl in Brampton runs screaming to her parents’ bedroom. They sit up to greet their crying daughter with faces that are unmistakably afflicted.

The population of Norwood is zero.

Guelph, three hundred. Maybe.

St. Catharines, eight hundred.

Hamilton is particularly disastrous. Pockets of homicide flare up with crazy unpredictability, confounding a military strategy that flexes itself, finally, in an anguished genocidal nightmare.

Hamilton: population definitely zero.

The QEW, stretching down around the corner of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, is host to a marathon of mad runners who are ignored by the Ontario military. They fall into a blinding wall of American weapons.

A serial killer sits in silent obedience at home in North York, surrounded by four uncommunicative guests.

By January the population of Ontario is only two-thirds of what it was, and there are no zombies left alive. By the first thaw an enormous clean-up is under way. By spring all killing has virtually stopped, except for the occasional murder committed by hunters who rush into the deep woods in the hope of bagging a real-life monster.

24 Home

If everything that ever brought a person to their knees, head bowed, hands clutching at thin air, had to be characterized somehow, several hands would shoot up immediately. Some of us are eager to tell others how this happens. You are born with what will bring you to your knees, and it patiently acquaints itself with you over long decades until, one day, with a blinding finger, it reaches up…

No, that’s not true. Not really.

Other hands go up. No one is called upon to answer. The look from the person at the front of the room, a left hand caging a left eye, communicates that it’s already too late, that we are already sitting in positions strange to this endeavour. We quiet down, fold our hands in our laps, respectful. The instruction is that forgiveness should be sought in the most forgiving space in the world: a little lounge music, an unregenerate appetite for heroin, a peaceful hand touches the corner of a chin, and a scratching fingernail is dragged up and down a forearm. A forearm as long as a country laneway. Someone leans over a neighbour’s crossed legs and says, “It’s good to be here anyway.” As a chosen member is carved open at the throat, hands knocking a lamp, a box of pencils, several people moan — “mmmmm” and “ahhhhh”— so we lower the lights.

Greg’s Higher Power reaches out beside his bed and traps a lamp switch between his fingers. The turquoise adjustable work lamp is clamped not to a table but to a short plank of wood held in place on the floor by a brick. When he pushes the switch on the crown of the metal shade the bulb is inadvertently directed towards his face. He redirects it with a swat. He turns to face the wall and waits for Harley who is sleeping in the upper bunk, to hit the snooze button. The beep persists and seems to get louder, more obnoxious. Greg’s Higher Power raises a leg from the bed, pulling it through the coarse grey blanket, which slides off, grating the smooth leg he extends into the bottom of the mattress above him.

“Yeah. Mmm-hmm. Ten minutes.”

The Higher Power sits up on the mattress and leans his face into his hands, breathing deeply through his nose. He smells the dampness of the mattress on his fingers. The lamp faces out across the cellar floor. Along space heater sits on three old issues of the Hamilton Spectator. The front pages of the papers are browned by the heating element and their bottoms are cold and wet against the concrete floor. Like a closet of props the cellar is crammed with neglected junk. Two old televisions, a collection of broken hoes, a saddle, canoe paddles, a stack of rough scaffold planks, a mouldy array of old coats, a rusted-out stove, a soft, black cardboard box full of engine parts, a rack of clothes bundled under plastic and tied with binder twine, a plywood reindeer with a red bulb hanging from its nose. Under the charred pipes of a giant furnace is a bunk bed. Greg’s Higher Power has lived here throughout the winter in the orange glow of the space heater, waiting for his grief to settle, for Greg to be less with him, for spring to come. For summer to follow.