Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

in adiseased 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 rear-view 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. Negligible difference. Essential. The child in the back window of the car ahead is not a weapon of war, but he bears themark; 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 handthrough the window. The