If Les were to remove his shirt, turn his broad back to a light source and allow a map to be drawn there, sharp metal flags could be used to mark the progress of his dead wife’s name, while the top of his underwear could be used to absorb blood as it flows past his belt. The curved red stain that dips over the cleft of his buttocks resembles the smile that has yet to become important to him.
He stands over his son, a little pink twitching man, and he shrugs out our pushpins as he lifts the infant in his blanket. The baby spits out the pill. Les has to insert it into the baby’s throat across the tongue with a finger. Les holds the tiny body against himself; it resists like an insect would, kicking with limbs that improvise. Les holds on in a crush, waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Soon the baby slackens, the way that babies do when they give up, and Les realizes that he is alone in the police station. Alone with his son and, lying beside a
jar of Dilaudid, on the desk, both his gun and the keys to his car. Les puts the keys in his pocket and, juggling the jar and baby like twins, thinks:
not mine, really, nobody’s.
He leaves the empty station and finds his car. Driving it from the small pound, he feels a little less excited about his escape than he had about his capture. The objects he carries cling together in inventory. They are only designed to go full circle and he feels them moving beside him. He hears them: “How can we stay meaningful in this, the loose wing of your adventure?”
Les looks down at the son he renames Ernie in desperation, and he cries because a mighty army of questions is bursting in on him from somewhere.
I am too small.
A tear, followed quickly by another, hangs off his upper lip and turns to a salty drizzle on his tongue.
I want to be him.
Les lays his hand across baby Ernie’s tiny forearm and he feels the cool chiaroscuro of the tubular limb in his palm — a peaceful place, a narcotic baby world.
I want to drive my car in there.
One of the circles that remains for Les to complete is made round in Caesarea. Les pulls the grey Datsun up into a driveway over an oil stain that drops like a tumbler beneath the car, clicking into place midway along the chassis. The house is a long lakefront structure with wide windows. He steps out of the car. He doesn’t recognise this place, though he has been here before. He does hear the distant jungle thrum of his wife’s name distorted and repeated by a relay of zombie mumbling. He can’t distinguish the word as he stands searching the white air for the source of what he thinks, with alarm, must be a very loud noise somewhere.
Some kind of crazy tree bugs.
Les scoops his inventory out of the car and sneaks like Santa Claus around the house, into the backyard that slopes its fine yellow lawn down to Lake Scugog.
“Hello!”
The voice is deep and torn; booming out around him it scrapes the water.
“Helen!”
What the hell?
Les turns from the boat he’s loading with guns and drugs and babies. The Knockouts. The woman he had struck earlier, still in her pyjamas, is lying on her back, tucked under the hedge that Les has just walked by. She waves a hand that’s missing two fingers and bangs her knees together in what sounds like an attempt to strike out the consonant L.
“Helen!” The little bald man appears through the sliding door. He is not Helen. He is also in pyjamas that bear a long stripe of mud. He grabs the doorframe and launches himself, on hips that pop audibly, into a surprisingly quick flight across the yard. In seconds he is on the dock driving his open mouth at Les’s face. The zombie’s mouth is now telescopic in its reach, and migrating birds take off and land through a hole that opens on his cheek. Les clamps onto the fiend’s arms and propels him into the water. He then jumps into the boat and hauls on the rip cord. The Knockout emerges waist high at the rear of the craft. He has been screaming under water and his voice pierces the air, exploding past sluggish submarine vibrations. He leaps up into the boat, locking his teeth on Les’s knee, and grabs the gun from the seat. With a dorsal fin flip of his arm the gun flies up onto the shore. Les pulls on the cord again, knocking the zombie’s head from his knee with a speeding elbow. The engine finally blathers to life.
The propeller, it should be said, is entering the zombie’s stomach. It releases an underwater ticker tape parade around the man’s waist. His intestines blow their contents out into the lake like party favours unravelling and filling with breath, marking and limiting the excitement. A school of perch, with pointy hats that fall drunkenly over their eyes and straps that pull at delicate gills, is circulating through the loose ambergris. The zombie caves in over the cannon ball in its middle and folds in half on the bottom of Lake Scugog. The boat, something of a paintbrush now, is still tied to the dock. As it extends itself it floats a long feather boa of blood
on the clear water. Les scrambles to the front to untie the boat, and after some jagged manoeuvring, made complicated by the interfering scalp of the zombie, the boat is soon cutting the lake into one of the infinite number of wakes that water places under all vessels. Les and his son are finally carried away, on a silver tray, out from Ontario’s zombies towards and horribly close to a fierce little island that is caught in a discrete destiny, one that’s strange to the rest of the province.
Ellen Peterson is not a zombie. She is standing in the dark, at the edge of a pool. She is not entirely sure whether she has walked here or whether magical inward steps have led her here to a place that she makes of herself. The surface of the pool reflects the full moon, and, Ellen thinks, it looks like a large plate in the centre of a satin tablecloth. Ellen drops to a crouch and places the tips of her fingers into the cool, still water. She wriggles her fingers and watches the reflected moon. It soon breaks into diamonds on the surface — diamonds she feels against the back of her hand. Ellen stops moving her fingers and the moon collects itself as white filings haloed over a magnet. Then it breaks again. This time clear in half. Someone is in the water. Ellen shrinks back from the edge. She focuses in the dark and silhouettes start to appear. A fallen tree lies across the bushes. This is familiar. A boulder, now lightly glowing, sits in the water at the far side of the pool.
This is the carp pond.
Ellen is relieved that she is in fact somewhere: a somewhere that she knows.
I am the reeve of this pond.
Someone is gliding through the water near the boulder. Ellen feels less threatened. She has jurisdiction here.
“Hello there.”
Ellen stands on the bank, closing the front of her bathrobe: a reeve in a bathrobe is better than no reeve at all. The person in the water stops and turns toward her with a splash.
“Excuse me, hello, is everything alright in there?”
“What do you mean?”
The man’s voice is whiny and defensive. There is something disturbing in the question.
“I’m Ellen Peterson, the reeve of Pontypool. There’s a great deal of trouble in the area tonight, and I’m asking if everything is
OK
with you in there. Aren’t you cold?”
Another voice to her left.
“Why, if he’s cold will he freeze?”
The voice, so tremulous, makes her shiver. The question somehow hasn’t been put to her rhetorically.
“Well, no, I don’t think he’ll freeze.”
A third voice in the bushes behind her.
“Are you lying to him? Is he going to freeze?”
The voice is so frightened that Ellen covers her mouth.
The man in the water has slipped behind the boulder and he holds its sides with his hands.
“If you’re lying to me then you could hate me.”
Ellen drops her hand. She feels the pull of sadness in the light that has emerged on the surface of the tree hiding these people.
“I don’t know you; I couldn’t … hate you.”
The head and shoulders of the man to her left glide into view at the centre of the pool.
“You don’t hate him yet. But if you don’t know him will you stab him with a knife?”
The man behind her squeals sharply, and he flees crashing through the trees. Ellen can’t quite believe this conversation. She has no idea how to meet its requirements.
The conversation that she is having isn’t, of course, normal.
That conversation would have its several participating members hitting a variety of vocal registers using a tiny lexicon. This lexicon has migrated to them from Parkdale, and they communicate through it with the sonic sensitivity of birds. They repeat the words
Helen, help
and
hello
in an evolution of the alliteration that’s more like an imbrication, shingling the words over a now silent H. And exactly who is stepping down into the pond and repeating the phrase “messy car, dirty bird”? Ellen has not detected the eighteen silent beings that surround the pool, hiding in fear among the trees. Each of them moves three words from cheek to cheek, like loose peas in a whistle.
“What do you mean stab you?”
Ellen’s robe rides in a terry cloth wake around her as she steps through the water toward the boulder.
“That’s what I said. That’s what I meant.”
Ellen stops still as three other beings float out from under branches that overhang the pool’s edge. They move steadily in the moonlight, forming a guard around the boulder.
“He means what he said. Now you want to kill him.”
“No. I don’t.”
“If you don’t want to kill him, does that mean that you want to run him over with a car?”
One of the silhouettes yelps as if struck and dives to the side.
“I … I … don’t want to hurt any of you.”
Ellen is aware that the pool is now occupied by at
least a dozen of these strange people.
“Not hurt? Not hurt? Do you mean not hurt now, but later? Like in the morning you’ll want to punch all of us? Punch us with a cannon?”
“Or a missile?”
“Or … or … maybe poison?”
“And angry now? Are you angry now?”
Three zombies splash at the water in a strange seizure that ends in one of them attacking another. The zombie being attacked strokes the back of his assailant with a consoling hand. The assailant bites uncontrollably at the man’s chest, opening a honeycomb of muscle and flesh. The victim soon slides under the water, and his mouth, the last cup on his body to be filled, glides away to drown. Ellen feels a panic lock her.
The killer stands up straight and exhales heavily, sending a piece of tongue flipping into the water. A woman directly behind Ellen speaks.
“Say sorry.”
The killer shakes his hands in the water. He closes his eyes, and in an emotional outburst that is small and painful he rolls his head back.
“I can’t.”
Ellen steps forward, her heart pounding in her chest. She raises open hands across the water and moves slowly toward the killer.
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
A teenage girl jumps out of a tree and stands in a moonlit path that drops into the pool.
“He doesn’t?”
Ellen feels a carp slide itself like a cat against her
ankle. A mile long. She catches her breath and waits for it to pass.
“No, he doesn’t have to be sorry.”
Another carp swims into Ellen’s joined heels. She turns her foot, letting it move between her calves. It’s slippery and fat and it tickles. A group of eight zombies moves quietly off the bank into the water. Several of them ask the same question at once.
“It’s
OK
that he killed Albert?”
Ellen scoops water up onto her dry lips. She notices the little bump of Albert’s floating tongue.
“It’s
OK
. It’s
OK
.”
Now the pool is becoming crowded with quiet zombies. They all seem to like being submerged up to their chests, so when they enter the water they sink to their knees in the mud and stone of its black bottom. Ellen is standing and she appears elevated on an artificial surface. Ellen notices that some of them have turned their backs and are busily working at something on the bank at the water’s edge. The soft fan of a tail runs against her shin. The carp is sitting on the floor of the pool, stationary. It caresses Ellen’s leg, and she is reminded again of a cat.
Nearly all the zombies have turned their backs on her. A woman working beside the fallen log turns her head to a man beside her.
“It’s
OK
to kill biting, y’know.”
The man remains hunched over.
“And I know it’s
OK
to tear fuckin’ fuckers’ heads off.”
The woman pulls from her spot and turns to Ellen.
“Is it
OK
?”
Ellen can see mud dripping down the woman’s chin. It looks like the chinstrap of a warrior’s helmet.
“Is what
OK
?”
All of the zombies stop, some of them grab the tree branches above their heads. A rhythm of ripples on the water’s surface smoothes. Ellen slips farther under, to her knees. She feels the little plosive blast as her carp propels itself off her thigh.
“It’s
OK
to … uh … sure, it’s
OK
.”
“How about killing them?”
Ellen feels a carp’s face in the upturned soul of her foot. It extends its sucker mouth and kisses her there. Ellen answers the question through a smile caused by a second carp on her other foot.
“Killing them is alright.”
“And slapping and slapping all the assholes in their heads?”
“Yes. Yes. It’s
OK
.”
“What else is alright?”
The carp have now settled into a synchronized kissing and Ellen drops her hands to her sides. She feels the soft drapery of fish moving along the insides of her wrists.
“Anything.”
“Can’t I ask?”
A zombie becomes agitated and turns from the bank.
“If she asks are you going to hit her in the ass?”
“No, no, she can ask whatever she wants.”
“Can I too?”
“Yes.”
“
OK
,
OK
. Is it
OK
to have a policeman banging on the door?”