He looks forward to the centre line shooting its bars at the grill.
Slow? Fast? What kind of a phrase is it?
Les adds up his argument for Ovid and against Ed Gein. Shape Shifter versus Killer. The former can also be the latter, but the latter can only destroy the former. Open. Closed. Dead. Alive. Good. Very bad. Except, he can’t quite hear the speech, something is holding it in front of the truck, not letting it in where it could be audible. Les looks out and watches a barn, black as the moon, and he knows why he has no speech. Because there really is a killer out there.
I crossed paths with a predator today. Someone bloody. Out of control. In control? He’s out there. Now.
He feels the tickle of fear grow. He pictures the rough hands of Ed Gein pounding the side of a horse.
“Hi Les.”
Mary is the principal of the school. Her background is military, and when the province attempted to redis
tribute talent outside the cities it met with a firmer resolve than its own in Mary. She is well liked, far friendlier, with more imagination and sanity than the young, unstable reformers so popularized by the government. At least that’s the local perception. She is a veteran of the tough decision, respectful of things beyond her control, with an angry, emotional bottom line. She detests the current government’s flippant emergencies. She is alarmed at the appearance of Les.
“Les, are you
OK
?”
She lowers Les into a chair in her office and he tells her his story. His back aches and his eyes water as he recounts the horror of what he’s seen. The scene has grown slightly bloodier now that it has taken possession of him, and he feels the bowling ball holes of the hunter’s eyes slipping behind his own sockets as he speaks. Looking down at his hands retracting between his knees, Les knows that he has changed. He feels that this person he’s becoming is not reliable, and of course he’s right. He’s attempting to absorb a great deal of unrelated material into a fairly primitive emotional machine. As the spinning blades descend into the febrile jar, what is going to be made of it all? An enlarged estranged lover, a son so new he’s still in orbit, a dead man’s cuttlefish face — and the cuttlefish himself, out there, scrubbing blood from his hands in the snow. He can’t help but make mistakes.
I am at the centre of this. I am somehow made of this now.
Ashamed, he confuses Mary’s hand on his shoulder with Helen’s.
Something she never did. She never let me soften. Not like Mary does.
He gives Mary a look so sodden with feeling that she turns away.
This man is in shock,
Mary thinks, and she asks him to wait while she goes to get the nurse.
Shock has made Les dull. He looks automatically to his wristwatch, but is unable to distinguish the time as being any different from when he had sat waiting for the detective. He rocks the face between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the tightness of the band around his wrist. A swirl of fake snow, distributed up from the base of the watch, covers the front of a dark church, and falls again quickly, frosting the little plastic cemetery on its grounds. Les shakes his hand, stirring up the scene as he winds his watch. He peers at its face and this time he can see a tiny robot, clad in a torn hunting vest, mechanically dipping and lifting a shovel in the cemetery. Les scours the icy black forest behind the church, looking for the killer. It is no surprise, then, that he does not understand that there is more than one killer on the loose.
The first killer, whose work Les has already seen, is now burrowing his upper body in the snow, thrashing his open mouth against the frozen ground. He is soon going to die a death like no other. Another killer is brandishing the same open mouth at a nurse, not thirty metres from where Les now sits. This killer has the nurse’s lips in his mouth and, with enough power to break both their necks, he shakes her face until its muscles pop from their moorings. The nurse falls against the cabinet, just out of reach of Les’s wild sight, and slides onto the floor. The killer’s neck is broken and
he stands over the nurse with his head dropping to his chest. His mouth is open, a bright red gasket through which the bleating of animals can be heard. The sound he makes isn’t human; the message, however, is unmistakable. He’s saying:
This doesn’t work, I’m failing.
The killer flees up the hallway, led by his own open mouth. Distended by its searching, it now flails forward. When Mary arrives in the nurse’s room she stops at the door, going no further than the single bloody hand wrapped around the door frame.
Murder scene,
she thinks.
Get Les, get out of the building.
She runs down the hall, back to her office. Les looks up, calm and blind. He makes a child’s resistant face when Mary drags him up by the arm. She doesn’t explain, leading him through the gymnasium toward a side door that exits onto the parking lot.
Mary pulls Les back, swinging his slightly stupid body behind her.
There he is.
The killer is sitting against the wall beside the door. He is rocking his upper body, his arms bowing at his sides. At their ends are upturned hands. Dead hands. Dead legs. His extremities, face, fingers and feet, are creased with jellied blood. Mary takes a step back, knocking into Les. He trips in a fall that brings Mary down with him. The killer is stirred and he sways his torso backward, turning his head to see them. Mary takes a four-legged step away. The killer tilts his body in her direction, as if he is part of her movement. Mary freezes, knowing that this man isn’t thinking, that he’s responding to his environment automatically.
She sees his eyes. His eyes. Like split thumbs they rise in his sockets and turn in their glue of prehensile clots. Towards her. Looking. The thing coils slightly, and Mary knows exactly what it will do.
It jumps across the floor.
Les focuses finally, resorting to a default set of perceptions. So, when he feels the weight of Mary on him, he thinks this is the morning after, that she is marsupial in her affection. He feels a centipede walking along his neck and he opens his eyes. Far above is the gymnasium ceiling, Mechano blue and space shuttle white. Mary is bleeding on him. She grinds against him to escape a man who is pushing her head with his own. She shakes herself and detaches the killer’s mouth, letting it free fall directly onto Les’s cheek. Les feels the lamprey gathering of skin and he rolls, sliding Mary out from between them. Beside him, the cannibal folds in half.
There have been two killings. Maybe a third. And nearly a fourth. But for now the Killings are a pair, a couple. And like couples do, the Killings look for what they have in common. They stand in line like all the other couples. Like other couples, the Killings share financial burden, discovering that as two they can afford so much more. They can take trips and buy things that as single nouns or verbs they never could. The Killings are combining their relatively limited horizons into something without limits, something dreamy. They share ambitions. Which is fine. Again, all couples do. All couples become all couples; however, they also harbour the seeds of their divorce. Right from the very beginning, in fact, what facilitated the attraction is always a tiny version of the end. He loved her because
she broke the spines of books when she read. She loved him because he pretended he was misunderstood, which gave her licence to pretend she broke her ankle. In the end he felt she didn’t even try, and as she turned to tell him that he was being oblique, she twisted her leg. Tiny story. But now the Killings are open to each other. A gymnasium shadow over a frozen river. An exchange of vows leaps like flame from one pair of mouths to the other. Except, the tiny story, what brought them together, is never spoken of again: the unstable Les Reardon.
And so it follows that when the Killings end they will hold up Les as the reason that they could never have succeeded, when everyone knows that Les, in fact, was how they met. He was their medium of attraction. For now, however, Les is just driving his truck, with Mary breathing in the passenger seat beside him.
He decides he’ll drive her to the hospital and phone the police. They should probably call the military. In the rear-view mirror a car that Les has already seen today appears. The detective is catching up, and Les reacts by pushing his foot down on the gas pedal. As his truck surges, Mary rolls over against the passenger window and dies with her teeth rung around an orange button. Her first act as a dead person is to seize, jacking her head up, lifting the button, freeing up the door, which opens.
Her second act as a dead person is to drop out of a speeding car pursued by a detective. Les watches her legs twirl like propellers as she departs. Like the bladed device that Les has been sorting out his life with, Mary’s
new machine takes her across the line. From sound body to unsound body.
The detective really can’t believe his eyes as the body cartwheels like a roadside zoetrope, alongside his car. He smacks his glove box and tosses a red light out and onto the roof of the car. Bands of candy run across the snow as the siren cuts open the side of another world. Mary’s body is held in the air for a second by this technology, caught at a right angle with its underside, until the engines of her disappearance coax her to the edge of Doppler. And then she is gone. The detective is thinking, no, actually he’s saying, “Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck! Holy Fuck!”
Peterson is not prepared when Les slows down to turn onto Highway 35, and the detective loses control of his vehicle. The car flips onto its side, and like a snow-removal device it bumps smoothly, still on its edge, fitting perfectly into the ditch where it plows sixty metres of snow. When it stops, the detective is alive, not even injured. Still, there is something altogether deadly occurring, something totally unrelated to this accident.
The detective, who has refolded himself to a sitting position on the driver’s window, looks up at the sun peeking in over the passenger’s seatbelt above his head. His head is clear of wounds and his eyes squint at the light. At the very moment his car began its clever trip along the ditch, up on its ear, a virus that Detective Peterson has carried for some time began a full relationship with its host. As he exits the car and drags his ass backwards up onto the icy shoulder, he does so as a
man with a disease. The first thing he says, as a man with a disease, is also his first symptom: “How is the part I get for?”
He slaps the edges of his boots together and the cold seepage of melting ice through the seat of his pants causes him to jump to attention. He is not aware of the obvious. The thing he said aloud did not succeed. He knows exactly what he meant. In fact, even without being overheard, it probably would have been equal to what he actually said:
How is the part I get for?
This is not to say that he could remain oblivious to the disease. It
will
become dramatic. The detective climbs over the car again and drops his arm through the open window. He fishes his hand against the dash and retrieves the cord to his radio. The length of this cord, two, maybe two and a half feet, is all he has left. He doesn’t know how slowly to ravel it in his hand. He doesn’t see the resemblance between the handset and the tiny coffin of an infant. He squeezes the little dead hand in his, breaking its baby finger, making it cry.
The detective is a foolish man, not smart or pleasant; so, while he becomes even less appealing in these last days of his life, an angel will be assigned to him: the soul of an innocent child whose murderer he brought to justice. The angel is assigned to him to remind us that we are tormenting a man who is loved by God.
Les Reardon is heading west on Highway 7 between Nestleton Station and Port Perry. This part of the country looks like a vast set of stairs, carpeted with trees, and is, in fact, the steps that lead down to the big city and its lake. Highway 7 runs along the edge of an incline, and to Les’s south the land drops away, greying into the phantom of a horizon. To the north the land sits high in the sun, like a cresting wave. The land is a market of conversions: farms into gravel pits, gravel pits into heavy machinery depots. And then these depots become the instant little communities that the machines have abandoned. Many people have travelled this highway to Port Perry, and many have carried tragedy. Children catching fire in the back seat with the meningitis that kills them between towns. A young man cradling a severed forearm between his thighs. The terrible family trips that end in violence on a sideroad. Les has joined those people who have suffered the unique agony of trying to escape impending doom by taking in the scenery. Most prefer to watch the land fall to the south, where they can be lost among hospitals. The north, on the right, has always risen in an opera of murder; it will broadside every family member, set in motion the suicides of giant people. Les, however, is looking across the front of his truck, into the white, for a place to pull over. He has vomited on himself and his vehicle is dark with the blood of a recent passenger.
He pulls over at the sideroad to Caesarea and steps from the vehicle.
They think I’m doing this.
Les pushes handfuls of ice across the muck of his coat. He opens the passenger door and hurls snow across the seat and dash. On his knees he works the interior with circling hands. A thin pink soup covers everything. He attempts to flip the lather of blood with the edge of his hand, and the ground at his knees becomes a ruddy espresso.
Les’s feelings of guilt begin to fragment, and so he tires of cleaning. In fact, he tires of flight altogether. Instead, he stands beside his car to wait until he himself comes to a full stop. In this stop he is reunited with the feelings that he woke with this morning.
I am a man who is trying. Helen. My son. This day has nothing to do with me. What am I doing? I’ve jeopardized everything. The police will catch this man. I have only done what anyone would do. Helen knows that. I have to turn around and help that detective. I have to report this.