Pontypool Changes Everything

1 Biopsy

In the beginning was a virus.

Its shape towered over all other early life.

The earliest carnivore, this virus slurped at the rim over which every animated thing first appeared. It recombined bitten elemental life in its cheek, releasing it back into the atmosphere in stringy vomit. These were the little dishes it invented for itself to make dinner more interesting, and life, thus interrupted, became the virus’s menu, little bio-copy houses, walking self-perpetuating delivery services, DNA was born. Living things were doomed to repeat their second step throughout eternity, into waiting mouths, never to know what direction they were actually spilling towards, condemned to contemplate forever, to nearly recall, the absolute independence that a third step would have brought.

The virus farmed the organisms into complexity, playing in this system like Disney World, reddening and pinking and bluing and dulling everything. The organisms evolved to the point where they comprehended themselves as copy machines, and almost instantly ecosystems began to dry up. The virus, fearful of this hostile extension — mechanical reproduction — jumped from the imperilled species into the imperious one. First, it adapted itself to life inside computer memory. In the year 1996 the virus finally came home.

The virus had hid silently for decades up in the roofs of adjectives, its little paws growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there; then, sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior workings of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the paradigms, jamming selection with pointed double fangs. A terrible squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across horizontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Radical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a fortune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the ground.

The plague first manifests itself in the infected person as a type of déjà vu, with an accompanying aphasia. Everything that happened presented itself as already happened. This infinitely complicated things. For as soon as the person adjusted, understanding that this sensation was merely a symptom of the plague, his or her understanding slipped backward into the already happened. Each realization had to be doubled against itself into becoming understood next: an impossible therapy to maintain. The present tense was a slippery slope to anyone in remission. The “now” became a deepening lesion, and from it rose the smell of this new sickness.

The disease developed in terrifying stages. First, the patient panicked and then sat stunned, silent, in a kind of exile. The person would eventually slip into a depression and exhibit ghastly physical symptoms. Typically the tongue would hang out, becoming dry and swollen, stiffening against the chin. This usually marked the end of the person’s exile from the living.

The advanced stages of the disease involved, astonishingly, revenge. This revenge was not the type we might recognize; it was not tied to an emotion or a desire, but to the other: a symptom of the disease. The disease is commonly referred to as Acquired Meta-structural Pediculosis. Or, AMPS.

The patients at this advanced stage turn into violent zombies. Cannibals. They knock people to the ground and bite away at their mouths. They devour skin and flesh, throat and tongue. Finally both the AMPS victim and the AMPS victim’s victim are destroyed by a single violent whip of the head that breaks their necks.

A carnival barker with a blond moustache wicked up either side of his nose is drawn in a panel by a cartoonist, beside a tall open mouth. Smoke curls up over the mouth’s giant upper lip. Greg closes this page, the last one, and he checks the cover price before sliding it behind the next comic on the shelf that’s part of this series.

2 City of Feeling

Their heads sway above their shoulders on Queen Street.

One of the first signs of viral presence is an addiction to Big Town TV. The station repeats itself, quotes itself, touches itself in a way that is somehow comforting to the early victims who cling outside the building tonight. This spectacle used to be reserved for those evenings when Electric Sex Party was broadcast live; now the crowds only appear when the program is rerun the following evening. Greg is standing somewhat apart from the crowd. He tested positive for the disease earlier this week, and though he’s asymptomatic he’s come to observe the people he will soon be forced to join. The crowd is not a dance crowd. They do not dance. They merely stand, watching the monitors, occasionally slumping, smiling weakly. Some have lain down to sleep on the sidewalk. Greg looks at the purple neon band reflected up in a black puddle between his legs. He follows this clean light as it pulls itself out of the water and embroiders a brilliant shadow between the stones in the asphalt. Greg twists at the front of his Monster Magnet T-shirt and whispers, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

Greg looks up at a vendor and spits towards him. The vendor picks up a sausage from the grill with a blackened fork and wags it at Greg, wiggling his tongue lecherously. Greg waits patiently, and sure enough his Higher Power, dressed entirely in black, emerges from a donut shop. He strolls out into the traffic holding his chin, sharing with Greg the difficulty of saying anything at this point.

3 Grant Mazzy

Behind the white glass panels that make up the edifice of Big Town TV, Grant Mazzy is scratching the top of his head, releasing a white dusting of dandruff that showers onto his pants. He presses his palms against his thighs and, pulling them aside, admires the glittery effect. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a technician strolling breezily through the open concept.

“Hey Bob.”

“It’s Carl.”

“Yeah, sorry Carl. Anyway, when the hell are those production people gonna be done with the closed coupling thing, whatever it is?”

Closed coupling is an idea developed by Big Town TV to accommodate its AMPS viewer. The closed coupling involves a tight repetition, a delay sample that they believe would conform to the rhythm that AMPS consume information. It is a woefully unscientific instrument, utterly useless to the AMPS victim, whose chaotic process wildly outmanoeuvres this primitive compensation. The technology does attract viewers, however, who are exhilarated by the idea.

A Max Headroom who cannot be cancelled.

Grant Mazzy catches his own face in a monitor and moves his chin quickly. When he is satisfied that he is “now,” he stares squarely at his handsome face, frankly assessing his own good looks. His own best critic, Grant judges his appearance harshly. He never solicits a better angle from his image: he expects every angle to be good enough. The technician checks his watch and widens his eyes above the clipboard he holds.

“Five minutes, Grant, then we’re rolling live again.”

“You know, this place gives me the creeps. Everything reminds me of that damn virus and those fuckin’ zombies outside. I don’t know. Where do they go? I mean, when they get worse, where do they go? These ones aren’t that far gone you know.”

“I don’t know, Grant, they say that some really sick ones are making appearances up north. Like gangs of them in North Bay, places like that.”

“I just hope that somebody’s monitoring this situation. I’m not sensing a lot of organized thinking around this problem. Oh, wait, my prompter’s up. Here I go. Shut up. Get lost. Shoo.”

Grant takes one last look at himself in a monitor and then makes his professional gotta-take-a-shit face into the camera.

“The Ontario government has shifted its position on handling the growing cases of AMPS. After losing track of several victims who are in the final violent stages of the disease, and after reports of people disappearing, the government has decided to implement new, tighter methods of regulating the progress of the disease. People with AMPS are registered upon diagnosis and are required by law to report to a designated physician weekly. Emergency facilities are now being prepared for those victims who pass into the dangerous later stages. The government has made failure to comply an imprisonable offence. Meanwhile, some northern communities are showing signs of panic and there are instances of people taking matters into their own hands. Officials would like to send the clear message that this is not only dangerous and illegal, but also, now, unnecessary.”

When the broadcast goes to another feed, Grant looks down at the monitor and watches his mouth blur backwards.

Or forwards. He can’t tell.

4 Julie and Jim

Julie is worried about her younger brother and she puts her arm around him in the darkness. They are sitting at the end of a short dock.

“Jimmy, I’m here you know. Mom and Dad aren’t really worried, they just love this shit. It’s like a war or something. They like to take it seriously, at least while it’s happening. Just ignore them.”

Jimmy had stopped speaking three days ago, believing that silence was the only sure way to prevent the disease. If you don’t use words, it can’t get into them, right? But he was worried about his father, who argued with the TV, who yelled at appliances and then screamed at his mom. Jimmy watched with horror, seeing this vivid viral highway shooting through the air and slinging infection into his father’s wild mouth. Jimmy sinks the front of his sneaker into the lake. Cold water is sucked inside the shoe when he separates his toes. Julie cocks her ears towards the cottage. She can hear shouting. It’s her mother. The cottage door slams and she shifts uncomfortably, hoping that no one finds them.

“Remember last summer when we saw that musky grab the duckling?”

Jimmy shrugs and lowers his other toe into the water.

“I’m just glad muskies don’t fly!” A June bug clings like a heavy clasp to Julie’s bangs. “Aah! They do! They do! What’s that?”

“Ahhh! Jimmy, can you see it? What is it? Is it a musky? Oh God!”

Jimmy reaches up between his sister’s frantic limbs and plucks the beetle from her hair. He holds it for a second, until its wings clatter against his palm, then releases it. The June bug veers up into the moonlight, flitting through the silver before plunging down into darkness and plopping heavily onto the water’s surface. Jimmy lowers his head, scanning the blackness.

“Let’s see if a fish grabs it. I bet one does.”

Jimmy raises his toes as a fish gulps through the water. Julie mouths “wow” and slaps her brother’s back. The sound of her father’s voice makes her pull the back of Jimmy’s shirt.

“You kids get back up here. Your mother’s worried about you.”

The father weighs a rock in his hand and calculates the intensity of a toss that could knock his son into the water. He mutters under his breath as he drops the rock and turns up the path.

“Little fag.”

At a nearby cottage the Wheelers are in bed reading. They are turned away from each other, hanging books out into the light of their respective lamps. Mr. Wheeler’s head is bobbing into the pillow and for the second it is lowered he manages a single full snore. Mrs. Wheeler notices this, and she closes her book and shimmies her back up the wall, watching him.

“Honey. Honey, I think we should go to sleep now. Don’t you? I think you’ll sleep tonight, dear. Look at you, you can’t even hold your head up.”

Three people are standing in the dark at the base of the stairs leading up to the bedroom. They are silent; that is, they don’t speak. But they jab each other. They’re standing, exchanging sharp punches. Cruel little punches, meant to hurt. More than that, they begin to stab their fingers into each other’s face, until a finger reaches an eye and one goes down on his knees. And when he does, his enucleated eye slipping through his fingers onto the floor, the woman begins strangling him while the other man reaches under, grabs his face, and begins to stretch the skin until it gives way and its contents burst onto the floor. The man falls, wagging his face on the floor, sliding the rubble of his lost features, like eggs broken through a grocery bag, back onto his head. The woman kicks the man’s neck and, after grinding it flat beneath her heel, howls out between her clicking teeth. She can’t even feel the quick, hard blows to her ribs.

Mr. and Mrs. Wheeler are sitting straight up in their bed. They have heard everything, and when the woman stops howling Mrs. Wheeler turns off her light. Mr. Wheeler glares over at her, panicked. Breathless, he says, “What… what?”

“Turn off the light, turn off the light. Get under the bed.”

The room is suddenly pitch black, and they both scramble under the bed. It will take an hour and fifteen minutes before a hand reaches for them. Mrs. Wheeler will feel her hair being tugged viciously from her scalp. In the meantime they wait in the dark feeling only the sprinkle of fibres falling onto their cheeks.

5 In the Middle…

In the second stage of the disease victims display symptoms similar to those of aphasiacs. Their ability to use language erodes. This disease, however, is not an organic one. Nor is it a disorder of the personality. Once infected, the victim produces the virus in the language he or she struggles with. The mature virus is a sort of hard copy of this production. The latter part of the second stage resembles Tourette Syndrome. The victim becomes frantic, rebelling against the onset of the disease by wilfully destroying, ahead of the virus, his or her own normative behaviour. It is a desperate attempt to escape. The victim batters at what is perceived as the horizon of his or her being. And the horizon, now heavy and meaningless, drops like a stone when approached. The victim becomes dangerously aggravated and insensible at this point. The horizon is, then, somehow transferred into the mouths of those not yet afflicted. Stranger’s mouths are the escape route through which the victim attempts to disappear, in a violent and bloody fashion. They often drown on the blood of those they attack or choke to death on the flesh.

Greg turns the page and studies the four panels that illustrate, without text, a cannibal on a throne surrounded by decapitated people. The cannibal holds a head in his upturned hand, his chin covered with blood. The head is upside down, and a little pink fray appears along the rim of the neck, the lipstick on the glass. Greg closes the comic book and checks the number on the top right of the cover before replacing it on the shelf. He leaves quickly, feeling the hostile glare of the man in an undershirt behind the counter.

6 Calling

Grant Mazzy lives, much like everyone else on Earth, in an apartment. In spite of his occupation, he is less vain than you’d expect. When he’s at home he spends no time in front of his reflection; in fact, he keeps only a small shaving mirror, and he has only seen his face at home bent by steam and encircled with moisture.

The face reminds him of work. His reflection makes him think of an alarm going off at 6:30 in the morning.

No, at home Grant kicks back by being facelessly, anonymously good. Grant’s true passion, the reason he keeps living, is to work tirelessly for charity. He sits on the boards of three major charities, lending his name and profile for their benefit. What he loves most, however, is the anonymous time he devotes to lesser known charities. Particularly the anti-crime program that is run in one of the city’s meaner parts of town, Parkdale. Grant volunteers his time as a counsellor on a distress line. This number is publicized in laundromats and bus shelters. Strictly small time, no budget, non-professional, a do-it-yourself, hands-on, community repair kit.

Grant pops open his small humidor and drops the point of his finger along the shaft of a dark cigar, a Monte Christo “A.” He rolls it into the corner and separates a Robusto that lies heavily on a bed of Punch Double Coronas. Grant hangs his hand over the box, rocking the Robusto between his fingers before pulling up the “A.” He rolls a silver bullet into its tip, softly popping out a plug of tobacco. He lights the cigar in big wet sucks. When the phone rings, Grant expertly rolls the cigar to the corner of his mouth with his tongue and slaps the speaker-phone button.

“Hello, my name is Bill, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline, how can I help you?”

Grant rolls his head, twirling the smoke in the air until it hangs evenly across his face; then he sits forward through it, closing one eye and hanging the cigar down loose from his mouth.

“Hello? Anybody there? Hello?”

Grant spreads his fingers above the phone and when the sound flattens he pats his thumb down to disconnect.

When Grant was in university, studying political science, he lived in Parkdale. Back when the Queen Street Mental Health Centre opened its doors to free its residents of their institutional bondage. Once freed, these high-functioning mercenaries swung into action and with strange ability they frightened the proto-Yuppie colony that had just recently moved into the area. A certain segment of Toronto had clearly developed a crush on Parkdale’s depression.

Grant Mazzy was renting a room on Wilson Park from an exiled Polish religious leader whose insane son almost always stood beside a grandfather clock in the hallway. Grant had a serious masturbation habit at the time, and his room was a sort of Jugs and Beaver emporium, smelling of curdled seed. Being unable to afford furniture, Grant was forced to make love on the coveted hardwood floor. The battering of his elbow against this floor drew complaints from the security guard who lived below. A soft, giant man who was orange from head to toe, this security guard worked sixteen hours a day and spoke aloud only once or twice a month. When Grant moved in and commenced his school term with one-handed procrastination, the security guard leapt into action and complained to the landlord daily.

One day the religious leader, a truly fanatical man, decided that with an insane son impersonating a suit of armour in the hallway, and a hot pervert in the attic, he needed an exorcism. When Grant climbed the stairs that day and opened his door he met with a flying Bible, candles, and wild Latin keening. The girlie mags were stuck together with red votive-candle wax in the middle of the floor. The landlord, now moaning loudly through a perfect O in the centre of his beard, was clad — they were visible between black robes that fell open — in white jockey shorts.

Grant wasn’t angry. He was frightened. He turned to go down the stairs, only to see the bearded son lurching up, his face apple red in the candlelight. The son bared his teeth, raised his limbs against their medicated stiffness, and closed his eyes tightly. Safe distances were closing. Grant sat down on the stairs, and he too closed his eyes, waiting for either the madman to pounce on him or the papal dervish to strangle him with a soiled holy thong.

A loud siren from outside distracted the men on the staircase, giving Grant enough time to break for the door. The house across from Grant’s place was spewing black smoke into the sky. Several police cars were pulled up on the lawn and people, mostly in hand-cuffs, were being led out of the building. Grant learned later that the fire had two sources. A man on the first floor who resembled an overweight General Custer had fallen asleep. A neglected pot of beans on the stove caught fire. Meanwhile, on the second floor, a struggling art student had ignited his upper body while experimenting with free-basing. The two fires failed to disturb a man who was pressing a pillow down on another’s face on the third floor. And when the killer’s victim was dead, the perpetrator ran down the stairs to help orchestrate the rescue. In the middle of this pandemonium, an older woman mentioned to a fireman that General Custer on the first floor had raped her on several occasions over the past two years. When they dragged him from his bed it took a team of paramedics two hours, not to save his life, but to wake him up.

It was at this moment, the inauguration of Parkdale’s new reputation, that Grant discovered two things. First, that his sanity was a goldmine. And second, that he would do whatever it took to save anyone he could from the dangerous squalor of this part of town.

“Hello, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline.”

Grant held his Robusto out and watched a long grey toe of ash tumble end over end into the ashtray.

“Hi.” A tiny voice. Casual. Scratchy. Male? Female?

“Hello. What’s your name?”

“My name’s Mark, what’s yours?”

“My name’s Bill, Mark. Hey Mark, waddaya want to talk about?”

Grant opened his refrigerator and shrouded the milk in cigar smoke.

“Well, I have a crisis, Bill.”

Grant peeled the plastic wrap off a glass plate and nudged the pickles and cheese that were arranged there. He re-sealed the plate and flipped open a plastic lid.

“It’s good you called, then, Mark.”

Grant grimaced at a smell that shot out of the container, and he hit back with a spray of smoke, then closed the fridge.

“It’s not gonna sound like a crisis.”

“Doesn’t matter how it sounds, Mark. You tell me it’s a crisis, that makes it one. So shoot, buddy. What’s up?”

7 Zombies

A long cord stretches out across the lake. Its frayed surface prickles the water. A needle width of blood and bone courses along the interior of this rope with such force and speed that if directed it could easily shave the poles clean off the planet. This is a dreaming AMPS victim. This is what its dream is. The AMP doesn’t fall asleep. Instead, it collapses from exhaustion and, before going under, batters itself to prevent sleep. Most unconscious AMPS put themselves there with a blow to the head which is, in fact, meant to keep them awake. The AMP who is having this dream now is lying on the floor of the Wheelers’ cottage. His throat is crushed and his eyes are draped across open fingers at his side. His spinal column is broken at the neck and a glistening area of spinal fluid laps at his shoulder like a lake teeming with fish. But he lives on, this thing. He sails on for the rest of his natural life striving towards his goals, different now, surely very different, and he’s cut down before he can reach them.

His heart stops and he dies.

8 Zombies Explained to Us

Dr. Rauf pulls at his sides as if looking for seat belts. He wiggles his hips in his chair, trying to fit his legs onto them. Eventually he settles. Grant pauses, scanning over Rauf’s cluttered pose, and phrases the question like this:

“Dr. Rauf, the explanations for this disease are very baffling, to say the least. It’s been said over and over again that this is not a physical disease or a mental one. And I suppose, while you’re here, we can clear the air totally. Is this a spiritual plague, as has recently been suggested? Clear that up for us now, could you doctor?”

Rauf rolls his upper lip under his nose, sealing his nostrils with the slick insides of his mouth.

“No. There’s no such thing. A very motivated speculation, indeed.”

Grant smiles. In fact, he is prepared to laugh if any answer turns out to be funny.

“OK. So we hear a lot about what this virus is not. And in fact, once we run through all the negatives, it appears that the thing doesn’t exist at all. So how is it that people are testing positive?”

“Well, one of the first things to understand about this virus is that its existence is incomprehensible because it exists contrary to the way our rational minds comprehend. And because the virus is situated, quite physically, anterior to the process of comprehension itself.”

Grant cannot hide his discomfort and his next question is impatient.

“OK. If you had to answer quickly, what would you say? Where is this virus?”

“Simple. It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc. A common effect being the sensation that the present moment is a copy of itself. It’s been misnamed déjà vu. Other early symptoms occur when the act of selecting a word becomes jammed. This process finds paradigms attempting to reinvent themselves as syntagma, and this manifests in the patient as fairly common aphasia. The person wants a fork but asks for a table or an oar or a knife. The next stages are more chaotic. As conditions within the personality become ultra-sensitive to their own construction, there is a kind of sped-up production of reality. This is a compensation for, or an escape from, the rending of their once invisible frames. Or horizons. Horizons that are quite literally looming. A frightening and painful type of madness ensues, and some of the incidents that we’re hearing about, cannibalism and whatnot, start to manifest themselves in the later stages of the disease. There are some radical metaphysicians now speculating about the potential for this virus to destroy the constitution of things beyond those physical individuals who have the disease. I would suggest that this, of course, would be suicide for the virus. It has, after all, a vested interest in keeping its host alive. I believe that the host is, in fact, everything beyond the boundaries of infection. Or, more conventionally, the host is the reality constructed to support us, and produce us, and on and on. Reality is an organism to this virus. That is, however irrational it may sound, a serviceable version of what has happened.”

Grant is in the grip of frenzied self-consciousness. He is close to understanding this disease and he can feel a terrible fear gathering in his good looks. He worries that his next question, that any question, or worse, that communication itself, is unsafe.

“OK Dr. Rauf, how are we catching this disease, how is it contagious?”

“Well, that’s a difficult question. One that is now being asked by teams of doctors, semioticians, linguists and anthropologists worldwide. A whole host of disciplines are working together on this one. It seems that people are waking up with it, so dreams seemed the obvious site of entry. It has been suggested that it is more likely that people are catching it as they move into a dream state. The structure of consciousness, identical to that of the unconscious, moves from the more or less illusory conditions of the personality into an automatic concrete version of the self found in dreams. The redistribution of elements may leave a person momentarily vulnerable to the virus, which may have already been there, dormant. Some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage. Like, well, like we’re using right now, Grant.”

“What does the virus look like, Dr. Rauf?”

“The immature virus looks a bit like a sunfish, brightly coloured, with spiky fins. And it has two long, pointy fangs, which it uses to practise scratching at the paradigms it will eventually invade. It’s important to remember, of course, that it is also becoming a tangent, and eventually the mature virus resembles the figure of abjection. The copy is a different matter. The copy is a strange, full and undetectable presence.”

Grant prepares his next question, pushing his finger into pursed lips, but he doesn’t ask it. Instead, he slides the finger into his mouth while making a slashing gesture across his throat with his free hand.

9 Lovey Pulsey Phoney

Grant has strong convictions when it conies to counselling the young, and he believes that adolescence is almost entirely a political passage. Young women should be made aware of the plight of their older sisters in shelters before being introduced to the thrill of the blouse. The connection, Grant acknowledges, is a male one, the short length of a long, punitive and controlling chain. He advises girls to seek out women who have enthusiasm, energy, exuberance. He instructs young men to proceed cautiously, to become aware of the complexity of the world, to seek out men who have a wide range of feeling. He cheers on the teenage homosexual, while sadly noting the complicated degrees of acceptance that await him. Grant listens with principled uncertainty, never hearing a wrong note in the broken voices of young men, or an awkwardness in a teenage girl, that isn’t important to the whole world. He gathers young people up and down, along the sides of his soft, kind voice, and asks some of them, with a hand dipping down through a circle of sunlight, if they would like to come and work in a big, beautiful television studio.

“Hello, Parkdale Crisis Hotline. My name is Peter, how can I help you?”

“Hi… uh… Peter. I got a strange question.”

Grant sits up on the couch and scrapes the label wrapped around a cigar. He flicks too forcefully with the back of his thumbnail and tears through the outer layer of tobacco.

“Oh… I’ve heard it all. You can’t shock me. Hey, first of all, what’s your name?”

“Uh, Warren.”

“OK, Warren, how old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven, eleven… I spoke to an eleven-year-old girl yesterday morning who wanted a sister so bad that she was pricking holes in her father’s condoms. So, Warren, I know all about you eleven-year-olds.”

The boy laughs and clicks his tongue. Grant can tell that, right now, this troubled little man can’t understand anything that isn’t directly his problem.

“Warren, I want you to take a deep breath and tell me, exactly, what you called to say.”

“Mmm. OK… I think I got the dog pregnant.”

Grant presses a finger on the edge of an ashtray, tilting it up off the table.

“Warren… that’s not possible.”

“I took the dog down into the crawl space and I poked it between the legs.”

Grant lifts his finger and the ashtray clicks on the glass.

“What do you mean you poked it?’”

“I went inside it. You know.”

“OK. Warren. No matter what you did. No matter what happened, you can’t get a dog pregnant. It’s physically impossible.”

The boy breaks in, crying and talking furiously.

“I’m so scared. I keep looking at her. She comes to me at the dinner table. What if she’s pregnant? What if? I don’t want a little dog brother! My parents are going to kill me! Shit! What if she’s pregnant?”

“Whoa boy! Slow down there, Warren. First of all, I wish you’d listen to me. Are you willing to listen for a second?”

“Alright.”

“Are you listening, Warren?”

“Yes.”

“OK. This is big news. This is important. Here it is: you cannot get any animal pregnant. None. Not a dog, not a squirrel, not an ape. Not ever. Ever. Never. Are you listening, Warren?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Now that’s fine. That’s definitely not your problem. But. But you still have a problem, don’t you?”

“What? What’s my problem?”

“Well, Warren. What you’ve done has made you feel bad, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a good thing. It’s right that this makes you worry.”

“It is?”

“Oh, yeah. The important thing here is simple. Simple. Just listen to your feelings, Warren. What are they telling you?”

“Uh… I don’t know.”

“They’re telling you not to do it again.”

“I won’t. I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”

“There you go. No harm done, right Warren?”

“No?”

“No. You have just become a little boy who thinks sex with animals is wrong.”

“I have?”

“Do you think it’s OK to drag the family dog down into the basement and give it a poke?”

“No.”

“Me neither, Warren. And that makes us both pretty decent guys, dontcha think?”

“I guess so.”

Grant smiles and tilts the ashtray again. He applies a tricky pressure with his finger, rotating the ashtray on its edge.

“Everything else OK, Warren?”

“I guess so.”

“OK, buddy. I’m gonna go now. You call anytime, OK?”

“OK.”

“Goodbye.”

Grant pulls his hair back and stands up from the couch. He spins two invisible pistols off his hips and says, “Fuck the dog.”

By the time he makes his way across the carpet to the refrigerator a charge of electricity has built up and it snaps between his finger and the handle. He jerks his hand up and blows on the finger, then shakes it out and returns it to the invisible holster.

Behind him the phone rings. An angelfish in a clear bowl sitting beside the couch turns away to face the dark hallway. It raises its hind end slightly and fans its tail, catching the pink glow of choral in the transparent ray of its anal fin. A thin beige spiral swings in the water and the angelfish shudders it free. Grant trips against the coffee table as he grabs the phone. He picks up the receiver and places the phone on the table, careful not to touch anything metal.

“Hello, you’ve reached the Parkdale Crisis Hotline. Who am I speaking to?”

“Hello. My name is Greg.”

“Hi Greg. My name is Grant. What’s on your mind, buddy?”

The Future Bakery at the corner of Tecumseth and Queen is the beehive, the recovering addict’s caffeine spunk house. Men who have spread their knuckles up to their elbows hitting women sip Turkish coffee and design their Higher Powers, informing each other about how to surrender, sharing affirmations in their collective exile. None of them will ever be what is commonly called a good person, but now that they have stopped being so actively bad, they chart together a course to the hereafter. Chosen and marked for this, they hug each other lustily.

When women venture near, sit at an adjacent table or assess them from the line-up, the New Men close off distrustfully. They welcome the amend-making process. They would love to say “I’m sorry” and stand in that unforgiving flak, in the pain of being wrong. But those days are gone. Feeling useless to either gender makes them merely pray. And prayer has made them different, gentler, sure. They really don’t beat women any longer. In each of their imaginations a new place has evolved, a place that loops off the side of their personalities.

Here they picture God.

In between Greg’s pierced ears, and under his pretty curls, lurks a Higher Power. The Higher Power stands near Greg while he jerks off, waiting patiently. He’s a Higher Power who doesn’t look away, but furrows his brow, knowing that sex is when you’re waiting for better behaviour, not guilty, not shameful, just not quite holy. As Greg wipes his semen from his palm, the Higher Power points at the cuff of his pants: you missed some, there, no right there on your pants. And then he smiles slightly as Greg says, “Fuh-huck!” and flips the white dollop into a Kleenex. When he’s shaken out his hair, Greg makes room for his Higher Power on the couch. He sits with his elbows on his knees and says, “Greg, I’m going to let you live forever.”

Greg already knows this, and his Higher Power never seems to tire of saying it; however, it’s supposed to mean something slightly different each time. Greg pinches his moist pant cuff and wonders what exactly it means this time.

Finally Greg says, “Are you saying I should accept that Jojo never liked Hogg?” Hogg is Greg’s recently deceased rat, and Jojo is his recently estranged girlfriend. In truth, the Higher Power thinks it’s a bit amusing that a dead rat and a relationship well-lost are persisting as “issues” in Greg’s recovery. The Higher Power is very aware that his own sense of humour is always inappropriate. He looks across at Greg, straining to keep his poker face, while he nods in a way that looks important. Greg suspects for a second that his Higher Power is mocking him. But he also knows how inappropriate his suspicions are, so he pretends they are not true.

Greg’s Higher Power cannot look him in the eye right now, so he lowers his gaze and spots another dollop of semen on the young man’s socks.

10 Original People

When Jimmy was very young — not that he isn’t now, but a few years ago, when he was seven — an event occurred that would predispose him to silence.

In the backyard of his parents’ house, hanging on a cliff over-looking the high-way, lived Jimmy and his family. This house was peculiar for several reasons. One was its dramatic placement on a cliff at the end of a street in an old suburb of Toronto. At the base of this cliff was a scrappy bit of wilderness that was screwed up tight as a jar, between the house’s backyard and Highway 401.

In this little patch of land, a sort of old smudge at the edge of a new drawing, a doomed population of wildlife was living out its final generation in manic friendlessness. Snakes copulated on the drying scalp of the terrain. A fox scrambled back and forth along an unearthed concrete conduit. A million mites lived on the rust from a single barb of wire. At night their eyes shone and their microscopic faces vibrated with insanity. Migrating birds that had made this a rest spot for hundreds of years now sensed something was terribly wrong. They lit on the backs of barrels in the fat brown river, and when their young looked hungrily at a suicided worm or a grinning minnow, they clicked their beaks, sadly, “No.” At night a faint popping sound could be heard up and down the river, as weak heart valves in the young owl population strained to sustain life until morning.

Jimmy spent a great deal of time here as a naturalist, learning to observe, to read into what animals wrote. And he read very well. When he climbed the hill in the late afternoon he always looked back over his shoulder, because he knew that this little patch of land was teeming with sick, unpredictable minds.

The vivid certainty that button-eyed rats were throwing themselves at his heels as he made his final scramble over the top of the hill made him scream. He ran through the yard to a back door that seemed to be held at an impossible distance. A family photo of the door dangled at the edge of the lawn, without enough dimension to escape through. The snapshot’s border of chemicals, the loss of his mother’s face into the glare of the sun or the flash of a distant bulb, sucked the oxygen from his lungs. He was lucky to complete the dash through his own backyard. Jimmy heard people reading aloud from magazines as he kicked at the ground between himself and this door, reading aloud about the boy who died legless and insane in his own backyard. His screams, these daily screams, were never heard because of another peculiarity about this property.

This house lay directly under the last leg of an airplane highway. Every five minutes, in the late afternoon, a commercial airplane tore up the air, drowning out Jimmy’s screams, dropping its landing gear just this side of the chimney so as to miss it and fall from the sky into Jimmy’s tortured ravine. While these planes landed somewhere else safely, they had also crashed moments before — eating up the ground with their noise; eating up Jimmy’s wailing, and ending the world over and over and over again.

As he lay there, for he always fell down to clutch the ground before he died, Jimmy saw the tiny red-button eyes of ravine rats look up and shatter. These tiny plastic shards flew across him as the belly of the plane lay on the earth to finally, after so many threats, end this. Needless to say, Jimmy was never able to finish his dinner, and when asked what he had been doing, Jimmy felt his young pathology squeezing his brain.

The more conventional fear, that his parents were aliens, was becoming a comfort.

Today is Jimmy’s seventh birthday, and his mother, or rather the alien who looks like her, is baking a cake shaped like a rocketship with a blue Commander Tom profile at the base. Like his mother, the artistic Jimmy is busy creating, and the tiny explosions he makes with his mouth attract her attention. He senses her alien eyes on him, and he looks up in time to catch her wiping the tell-tale green of the icing from her extraterrestrial nose.

“Jimmy, are you drawing those nasty drawings again?”

She slams her powdered hand down on the drawing before Jimmy has a chance to pull it away, and she turns it toward her. The drawing depicts a giant rat covered with buttons that are being sewn onto it by an airplane captain who is stretching from his cockpit to stab a needle into the rat’s eye. Assorted cowboys and Indians and dinosaurs are scattered in pieces around the plane.

“Jimmy, why don’t you ever draw nice things? And whatever you do, don’t let Missus see these. Hide them with the others in your room. Now go out and play in the pool with your sister.”

Missus was the woman who came in and cleaned once a week. She was a Jehovah’s Witness who became confused and angry at even the thought of dinosaurs. Upon seeing one of Jimmy’s drawings she asked to leave immediately; clutching her old heart, she limped home in a state of abjection. Jimmy’s mother watched helplessly from behind the curtains in the kitchen. Missus returned the following week, but she has never entered, nor has she since been asked to enter, the boy’s room.

“Careful out there, your father’s tools are lying all over the place. Take a towel.”

Now there’s the hill, that lost wall, and the weasels are wiping their gums against it. At a distance, somewhere above Jane and Finch, two airplanes are waiting at an intersection. And in the lawn below and to the west is a small rectangle punched into the ground coated with concrete and filled with water.

In this wading pool stands an eight-year-old girl. Beside the pool stands a seven-year-old boy. The boy strolls over to a saw that hangs at an angle in a plank that is stretched between two sawhorses. He rocks the saw until it squawks out of the wood.

There are thoughts going through this child’s head, which is normal. As normal as it is to place thoughts in a head. And they are arriving and departing in the usual custom. That is, as far as it is usual for thoughts to arrive and depart. These thoughts, idle and wandering, are picking up speed, accumulating a motive from the way they are arranged. There is a dangerous belief in the corners they turn.

These thoughts: The saw can enter wood and my father can leave it there. Can it enter my sister and can I leave it there? To the saw, my ruler, my king, my sister is wet inside like wood, and her grain is looser and nearly separated anyway. So where is the difference if I draw the separation out? Make her wood. The same. She is wood. Peaceful and heavy. The little teeth marching across her shoulder. That’s it.

The grim little mouth the saw has made in the plank blows blonde fibres from its lips and gives the word. Jimmy slips into the pool clumsily, dragging the saw behind him.

Behind Julie’s head is the deep blue of the sky. A blue most like that colour is at her shoulders, whitening as it leaves her, travelling upward. On the surface of the sky, microscopic bacteria living in Jimmy’s eyes flow from the sun into Julie, who is smiling. They’re glancing down at her shoulder, inviting the saw there. Jimmy lays it on her shoulder and draws it towards himself. Then he pushes it along a groove that starts easily in the skin. A bright strip of blood highlights the course — down through her body — the saw will take. Julie’s face is calm, at least as calm as Jimmy’s, and she smiles with a full understanding of what is happening.

When their father runs around the pool, as if up a ramp, his mouth is open and through it an airplane comes out of the sky. Julie and Jimmy lean towards each other and kiss in the silence of this moment. Now husband and wife, they kiss each other goodbye forever. When the airplane advances past the sky and their father’s voice starts up in his mouth again, Julie and Jimmy pull apart sheepishly and Julie begins to howl in pain, holding her shoulder. Jimmy sees, for the first time, all the blood in the water.

In every home movie and photograph that their father will take this summer, the girl’s shoulder will have a large pad of gauze taped to it. And Julie and Jimmy will grow apart like brother and sister.

This event also marks Jimmy’s first deliberate silence, a silence that will last three months and will return every three months. Like now, as they make their way up the path in the dark, four cottages away from where people are eating each other alive in a now brightly lit bedroom.

11 More Mazzy

At his desk, Grant Mazzy sits across from the only person at Big Town TV who is willing to spend time with him.

Steve is a student volunteer, which means he is something of a slave. He’s young, eighteen or so, with an anachronistic blond pompadour, tight rockabilly pants, and pointy boots. Grant has asked himself whether this look, the way the kid features it, the way it precedes everything else about him, is trendy or disdainful of trends, or trendily disdainful of trends. Is he ultra-hip and ironically retro-quoting another ultra-hip that had hotly retro-quoted another ultra-hip that once, long ago, railed against, what? What? Uh, squares? Grant has decided, in order to get through the day, that the kid is just a bit silly looking. And that is that. Besides, because of the way Steve has followed him around and bumped against him and bobbed his head like a good dog, Grant figures those old squares, as referentially obscure as they have become, have nothing to worry about anymore, anyway.

Steve picks up the second phone on Grant’s desk and gives the “Girlfriend” signal, followed by the “Sorry dude” signal. Grant stares at the kid for a second, watching as his face crumples towards the “No, I’m really sorry, dude” signal. Grant smiles and pulls a Romeo Y Julieta Tubo out of his shirt pocket. He swings it in his fingers and taps it onto his phone to get the orchestra’s attention.

“I’m getting phone calls you wouldn’t believe. Calls from, like, look at this. Here’s an anthropologist. Here’s a linguist.”

Steve’s eyes dart quickly to the side, toward the East Indian weather person who sits quietly surrounded by unused phones.

“Semioticians, doctors, and a feminist lawyer, and, oh, this one’s rich, an art critic, an art critic who now fancies himself a virologist… now what was that about…”

Steve sits nodding at Grant.

“Here it is. Yeah, art critic, thinks the virus became contagious when Marcel Duchamp got a guy called Steiglits to photograph a urinal in 1919.”

Steve has heard the name before.

“Who?”

“Marcel Duchamp. You know, the urinal. Uh, the bride descended on the bachelor, something. Readymades, that sort of thing. A dadaist.”

Steve remembers him.

“Right. The Nude Descending a Staircase. I know. Yeah, so what does that have to do with the virus?”

“Well, this critic seems to think that Duchamp’s experiments with the fourth dimension, sending a urinal into it, somehow caused a breach of some kind. And when the piss-pot returned, some kind of illuminating gas got in through the nth door type of twilight zone shit. Anyway, in here somewhere pops a virus you catch through conversation. Crazy, eh?”

Steve smiles, “So, like, I guess this is one disease that you can catch off a toilet seat.”

“That’s right, kid, very good. Very good. Now, what am I gonna do here? The only virologist I don’t have is a virologist.”

12 The Volunteer Is Fatal

Greg is not sure what it is that people should know. He thinks that there is certainly something. He sits in Grant’s small office drumming his fingertips against his thighs. Three weeks ago I get a fatal illness, and today I start a new career. Greg is anxious that these two clauses keep a safe distance from each other. Even though he suspects they are dependent on each other, he avoids acknowledging them at the same time.

When Greg thinks of the illness, he does so with a consciousness that is dim and oval, capable of spreading outward, yes, but with borders that he keeps visible at all times. If he thinks of the new career, he does so less in a space than in a direction. His thoughts brush towards something, incapable of wandering or examining or dissolving. He fears these thoughts are actually directionless, so he caps the furthest ones in arrowheads. When he thinks of his illness, his career is simply that unthinkable; and when he thinks of his career, his illness is also that unthinkable.

Now that he is sitting in the office where he’ll be interviewed, Greg has the sinking sensation that his arrows have abandoned him. He sits calmly at the doorway to this softly lit oval: the disease that has never manifested itself. The disease that includes him while the arrows cut him off.

The office is lit only by a long desk lamp that sheds light across surfaces, dropping two hard crescents onto the floor. Greg slides his foot out from under his chair and pushes the toe of his running shoe cozily into the sharp edge of one of the crescents.

Grant enters the office. He looks at everything, the chair, a framed photograph of man at a sink, the fax machine, the ceiling, everything except Greg.

“Hello there. Grant Mazzy.”

A hand goes out, eyes drop to a hand brushing an imagined crumb from his thigh.

“You’re Greg?”

Greg suddenly wishes he was home, sleeping in. “Uh, yes, I’m here for the volunteer.”

“Well, no, you’re here for me. Hah! You are the volunteer, right?”

Greg feels the crescent of light cut open the top of his foot.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“OK then.”

Grant lifts and drops the tip of a pen in front of his face, following it with his eyebrows, not his eyes, which he widens to introduce Greg to new perspectives.

“I gotta tell ya, Greg. You’re gonna look back one day on this meeting and I guarantee that you’ll say to yourself one of two things: I should have got the fuck out of there as soon as I saw that guy; or, you might say, that was the day that I started livin’ for myself.”

Grant coughs up in the air, like an animal, a seal tossing a ring, a lion throwing its mane.

“And you’re gonna get all that by living for me.”

Greg can’t look straight ahead. He focuses on a silver bullet on a key-chain that lies on the desk.

“Now I’m gonna say something that offends most people. I’m gonna say this for two reasons. One, to see whether you are like most people — an unfortunate shape to find yourself in. And two, if you are like most people, I can at least have the pleasure of watching you puff up before I spin you outta here. Ready?”

Greg lowers his head slightly, scooping his jaw out in small acceptance. He pushes a scale of dried semen off his knee with the back of his thumb.

“OK. If you work out here it’s gonna be because you let two things happen. You’ll let me own you; and you’re gonna fall head over fuckin’ heels in love with me.”

Grant jabs a finger off his chin at Greg. The other hand gives a disgusted shake in the darkness above the lamp. I’m not a pussy. The world is full of pussies. I dismiss them.

“I’m gonna tell you something now. Later, if you do a few things for me, I’ll show you what I’m talking about, OK?”

Greg feels a little roll of exhilaration. Grant detects it.

“OK. This is it. You know the world you live in? You know the one. Little things going on, urgent things, terrible true tales of human struggle, reasons to go on, reasons not to go on, blah, blah. The world you live in. Well, it’s only one of, say, about fifteen or so. And each one has a serious claim on you, a vested interest in your stupidity. In fact, your world is maintained in a very deliberate way by the fourteen that you’ll never encounter.”

Greg notices that his Higher Power is standing in the corner of the room. He looks frightened.

“You watch the news, right? OK, picture this now. There’s me on the screen saying, oh, I don’t know, ‘a home invasion last night’ — blah, blah. But I’m not saying something, too. I haven’t said: ‘A prostitute was found in a dumpster with her arms severed.’ And I haven’t pointed out that this woman is the twenty-third this year! I’m not going to say that the murders are committed by a serial killer. Why am I not saying this? Can you guess? Because they weren’t. They were killed by an organization. Organized. And if it comes out, a connection is made, maybe somebody says three murders or seven in a row or whatever, then, through me, a very sophisticated solution comes along and dissolves the cell walls of this story. You may read it somewhere, but it won’t live. And it gives rise to a home invasion story — which is just a tiny version of how the other story died. Hmmm. I’m gonna take you to where things are infinitely amusing.”

Greg’s Higher Power looks over, impressed. Grant spreads his hands flat across the desk under the lamp.

“Now we’re going to go downstairs, into the basement. I want you to stand guard for me for a while. We’re going to do something criminal, uh? A little bit. Enough to make the tiny world gag. Ready?”

Greg looks over to his Higher Power, who shrugs and places his hand over his heart.

Greg sits in a chair in the basement leaning back against the wall. His Higher Power is distressed, pacing in front of the door that Grant has disappeared through. The Higher Power puts his ear to the door.

“What do you think he’s doing in there?”

Greg shrugs.

“What a show he puts on. Very dramatic individual. What do you think he was talking about?”

Greg looks up at the tall figure.

“I don’t know, why don’t you open the door and ask him?”

The Higher Power puts his hands under his chin and mouths “No.” Greg shrugs again, this time a little contemptuously. The Higher Power lays a hand on the door behind him and drums lightly with his fingers.

“OK, OK. Let’s find out what we’re getting ourselves into.”

He clicks open the door and as it falls ajar he steps clear. Greg can see Grant’s legs. He’s leaning against a file cabinet. The blond head of a teenage boy is working back and forth between the dangling ends of his undone belt. The long legs of a woman step in front, blocking the view. Her hands gather the back of her skirt, raising it across the bare cheeks of her ass. The Higher Power reaches in and pulls the door closed.

“Oh Christ, that’s all you need.”

Greg is obviously affected by this. His face is flushed, and his breath quickens. The Higher Power, knowing full well what does and doesn’t lie within the bounds of his control, gestures defeatedly to Greg’s hands — which are now descending purposefully into the top of his jeans. Greg leans, bent over in concentration, a gangster clutching his fatal wound. And when he expires, he looks up, his face soaked with sweat. Unable to make eye contact with his Higher Power, he asks, “Nobody came by, did they?”

The Higher Power, looking a little older now, smiles wearily and again mouths a silent “No” while absentmindedly waving a hand up and down the hall.

“I gotta say though Greg, there are people who’d disapprove of this. People you respect.”

The door pops open behind the Higher Power and Grant emerges, his cheeks pink and his eyes glazed. No sign of the other two. He looks up and down the hall, causing the Higher Power to look away quickly, embarrassed, even though he’s invisible. Grant walks towards Greg and leans over, placing his mouth beside his ear.

“There are two other volunteers, like you, that are working down here this morning. They just sucked my dick. Thought you should know. Thanks for making it possible. Now go in there and see if they need any help with the filing.”

13 No More, Not Me

The church is a three-cornered hat made of newspaper. The hat is lowered by hand into a pool of oily water on the street. The water is refreshed from below by a catch basin. A strongman in red-striped tights with fists against his hips shakes his face, just beneath the surface, just beneath the paper boat. Cold water rattles between his closed eyes and the newsprint hull.

This is the strange little vessel that God made especially for people who have overcome addiction with the help of baby Jesus. They are sitting in the basement of the hat, crowded around card tables and spooky candles. They are trying to isolate a kind of breathing that starts in the left lung and moves up the abdomen like a light hand, teasing in pinches and rolling nipples between knuckles. A flame enters the room and steps around the seated people. Without making eye contact the flame mounts the wick, splashing hot wax on thighs drawn around the candle. Finally, the flame crosses its legs, lights a cigarette, and blows illuminating smoke in a man’s face. The man looks up at the candle and speaks with lips that are made gold by the light.

“My name is Donny, and God knows I’m still an addict.”

A woman to his left frowns for him, and a little bald man to his right looks down thoughtfully at the tight T-shirt he’s wearing. It has risen above where his swollen belly hangs out its starkly public flesh. He pulls at the shirt with his thumb but fails to hide his belly. He folds his hands in front of it and looks up bravely across the table. A thousand hairs weave and wiggle on his bared stomach. He has to concentrate to listen. The room of people becomes silent to dignify his struggle. The man is visibly grateful. He focuses thoughtlessly on Donny. Donny begins explaining something that is constructed like a list. He has bulleted his lists with a light karate-chopping hand on the table edge.

“And if I do these things to the best of my ability, maybe I can live a life free of the fear that I’ve lived with ever since I was a kid. Fear. I’ve always been afraid that I was a geek. And I was willing to trade in anything not to be myself. To become a wiseguy, someone who intimidated you. But now I’m trying to find out who that geek is. Who he was trying to become. I hear the word geek and I realize it’s a word that I use, that I still use, to intimidate myself. Not you. You don’t give a shit. I know that now. I have only ever scared myself. I don’t have to do that today. Keep an open mind.”

A woman is sitting across from Donny. She has taken the lovely breasts that God gave her for feeding babies and frolicking alone in the woods, and surgically redefined them as “huge tits.” She has been staring at the folded hands of the bald man all through Donny’s sharing. She thinks that this little bald man’s bravery is beautiful, and she has been fantasizing about oiling up that taught tummy and riding it like a pony. Donny has lowered his golden face in his own dramatic pause, but he can’t help but look up to see if it’s really the moment he thinks it is. He sees the glazed eyes of the woman across from him and, of course, her sweatered breasts plunge him into a powerful default response. Donny feels his penis jumping in little coughs, and he smiles at the woman, who isn’t looking at him. He thinks before speaking — I’ll never be the geek I wanna be.

“My biggest problem is about eight inches long. That’s the distance between my head and my heart. I can think just fine, thank you very much. That’s what I do best. Taking the world apart and putting it back together exactly the way it should be. I do this so fuckin’ well that when I’m finished I’m in a fuckin’ room full of nutcases who wanna teach me how to pray for God to fix me. But, you know, he does. Really. He does fix me. These are better days, only that lump of shit that lies eight inches south drives me crazy.”

The little bald man has sat forward, resting his face in his hands. His elbows are on the table beside Donny’s hand. It still chops away even though lists no longer govern what he’s saying.

“You know, when I ask people, y’know, what the fuck should I be like now that I’m no longer like myself, you know what they say? They say, ‘Hey Donny, just be yourself!’”

Donny leans forward, drawing his audience over a nastiness he knows they’ll all enjoy.

“Well, well, well. That’s just never gonna be a good fuckin’ idea, is it?”

The bald man smiles against fingertips that hide his mouth.

“I am a person who wants you to die along with him. That’s who I am.”

The woman across from him feels, along with everyone else in the room, all of the possibilities, the little shiver of Donny. She bisects the upholstery of her cleavage with the table edge. Donny gently drops his hand, transforming it from a karate chop into a coin that rolls across the table and lodges securely in the soft slot of her body. The little bald man sits back and his belly flies like a huge fruit bat out from over his belt. He has grown exited and he speaks.

“Thank you Donny. My name is Mike, and I’m an addict.”

Attention is suddenly dispersed around the room and in this chaos everyone feels a refreshed opportunity to have another shot at being a little more dignified.

“Well, you know, no fuckin’ big deal, this. I was in a tight fuckin’ spot. That was my problem. That’s what brought me here. Not the ‘God this, God that.’ I didn’t wanna become a good person. Fuck no. I just wanted to go from ‘A’ to ‘B.’ ‘A’ happened to be a fuckin’ nightmare where I’m holding the barrel of a gun in some guy’s mouth; but, you know, whatever. Keep an open mind. And ‘B,’ I didn’t even have a fuckin’ ‘B.’ So I come here ’cause all you fuckin’ people are talkin’ about how people like me get out of a jam. So I’m hangin’ around, and the first few months I’m not shootin’ dope. A good thing. But I’m still bringing a piece to meetings. And I’m keepin’ my distance, with my hand on the piece, thinking, if one of you fuckin’ fags tries to hug me I’ll blow your fuckin’ nuts off, right? But soon I leave the gun at home. I don’t even know why. I guess it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I can’t really see myself using it, so I leave it at home.”

Greg is bored. He’s heard Mike talk about bringing a gun to meetings a thousand times. He knows it’s important that Mike is being honest about this, but, Greg thinks, how come he’s honest about the same thing all the time?

“So I start listening to what you were talking about, and I thought how fuckin’ weird it is that the gun I was packin’ was packin’ up my fuckin’ ears. Y’know what I’m sayin’?”

Several people laugh. Greg looks around irritated, they always laugh at the same shit.

“I get rid of the piece. I start thinking: alright, alright, for fuck’s sake, I suppose I gotta get a fuckin’ job now and… and… I do! And I say alright, I guess I gotta call up the old lady and tell her that, no, I’m not gonna blow her fuckin’ brains out. She’s safe, and she don’t even have to believe me,like you said, it’s just true. She’ll figure it out. Dee-dee this and dee-dee that, and pretty soon I notice, I only notice, I don’t understand it, but I see that I go towards ‘B’ by being this nice fuckin’ guy. And I say Holy Fuck! How did I become this person worthy of my son’s respect? This stand-up guy. Jesus Christ! And you tell me to be grateful and I say: fuckin’ right, I’m grateful, I’m grateful all to fuckin’ hell. And you say be grateful to God. Be grateful to God?”

Greg notices his Higher Power sitting in a swivel chair just outside the circle. The Higher Power nods toward Mike for Greg’s benefit, then he flips his hands, giving up, making a psychological face that Greg finds insulting. Greg watches Mike’s mouth open and close around the word fuck and he remembers his boss earlier that day: his face flushed, not with embarrassment, but with the bracing clarity that comes from blowing your load down a volunteer’s throat. Greg fantasizes about being on both ends of the arrangement. He finds that they are touching the same ice cube, equally cold and satisfying. The two men are exchanged by the act, no longer thinking about each other, or sucking each other, but laughing, now, because they are not each other. Greg thanks Mike in mumbled unison with every one else.

Donny, who has been the chairperson, takes the pause after Mike as an opportunity to close the meeting. Mike accepts this, and stretches in his chair before standing and patting himself down. His belly, which continues to win every battle it wages, governs him physically as he stands. Others follow, pushing empty chairs towards the centre of an enclosure that they begin to make with arms tossed around each other’s back. The woman across from Donny pulls her hands down and hops away from the circle.

“Oh. Oh, one last thing — um — oh, yeah. April — addict. The women’s retreat up at the Elora Gorge has been cancelled due to the restrictions that were just announced. Re: the AMPS problem up north. So if you have paid already, contact your Group Service Representative for a refund. That’s me at this group. If you don’t know who your GSR is ask any member. Thanks.”

Greg feels a whimper run across his chest. His feelings about the disease he has have been making ever-tightening circles around him. Not yet inside, but preventing anything from leaving. Greg lowers his head for the serenity prayer, which he pronounces sub-sonically as: “Gaw gra ma tha savanah tee ta set ah ha ah kenna shay, ah tha crash ta shay ah they aka ah tha wistah ta oh the dimffimff.”

The people who have left the meeting are gathering at the rear door of the church, smoking cigarettes and arranging groups that will leave separately and arrive together at a cafe on Queen Street. Greg is standing alone, feeling self-conscious of the fact that his Higher Power is the only one who’ll stand with him. And even then, this invisible being, dressed in black, appears to want to mingle.

On the other side of a tall hotel lobby ashtray that tilts at the edge of the asphalt, Mike is lighting April’s cigarette. April reaches across to hug him, keeping her hips back to accommodate Mike’s leading stomach. He in turn bows his back out between his shoulders to create a cave in his chest where April can store her giant breasts for the duration of the hug. They part smiling, embarrassed and thrilled by the comfort of their touching.

“How long have you been the GSR?”

“About eight months. What’s your home group?”

“Oh, I don’t have one right now, but I’m thinking of joining this one.”

“Great. Let’s go put your name in the ledger.”

“OK.”

April leads Mike back into the building and down the stairs. When they return, everyone will have left, and not wanting to go straight home on a Friday night they’ll go off together to a cafe three blocks west of where the rest of the group has already convened.

April, who has created a safer world for herself, has a test that a man must pass before she’ll spend any time with him. This test is based entirely on the spiritual principles of the program she’s adopted. Honesty. Open-mindedness. Willingness. Tolerance. Acceptance. He must also be able to care for himself completely. She is watching Mike for this now.

Mike carries himself like a gallant caricature of kindness. He makes amends to women whenever God will let him, swooping open doors and laying out well-defined compliments. He listens carefully and smiles apologetically at his own compulsion to solve their problems. He might be the kind of Mr. Right that April has been looking for.

When April and Mike move in together she will teach him the real thrill of lifelong romance, its enduring pyjama party of dirty thoughts. The delicate gift, the body as an object. But first he must prove that he can be, and not be, her sister.

Greg is standing alone near the top of an alley that runs behind a highrise apartment. Alone. Alone except for a Higher Power who stands under a streetlight, impatient now for his young charge to surrender his increasingly bizarre will. The Higher Power knows that this is a dangerous time for Greg. He has a strange new disease and nobody knows for sure how or when it will manifest itself. The Higher Power leans into the dark and, covering his mouth, shout-whispers: “Greg! Greg! Come on, let’s go have a coffee! Greg!”

But Greg disappears into the dark of the alley. He’s heard something and he’s going to investigate. The noise, coming from behind a dumpster at the far end of the garbage-strewn alley, is human in origin. A crying growl, a scraping sound. Greg stops halfway. Behind him three cars pass noisily by the entranceway and their warm triple swoosh pulls Greg cautiously back a couple of steps. He is frightened by the slurps and rustles he hears coming out from under the dumpster.

“Greg! Greg! Come on! Get out of there! Greg!”

The Higher Power feels a little slighted in being ignored. I shouldn’t have to try so hard. He lowers his head and sighs before straightening his back and arms. He steps into the alley and swaggers for courage as he walks to its dark end.

Greg is standing pinned against the wall, facing the back of the dumpster. The Higher Power is prepared to be forceful. To launch him toward the street by his collar. He reaches out, holding two fingers over Greg’s shoulder, and he looks over his back. He blinks once at what he sees, freezes for a second and then bolts up the alley and turns the corner at full tilt.

A face is a marvellous thing for those who possess it. It is really the only thing that distinguishes us. Not quite enough to recommend us, just a trickster feature of our anatomy that makes everyone appear famous. But still, the face is beautiful. A sensitive sign of obscure integration. And every once in a while that integration is challenged.

Like now, behind the dumpster. A man is lying back against the garbage bags piled there. His face is mask-like sad, with worried eyes and eyebrows angled in an anxious incline. His mouth is pursed in a whistle, sucking saliva noisily as if through a straw. In fact, he has been sucking through straws. He has made straws out of the left cheek and upper lip of a woman who is lying across him, her head cradled in the crook of his arm, protected gently from falling loose on its broken neck. The flesh of her face is raised in turrets, sucked into bloody spouts that are white and new at their tips. Like infant mouths, blind and despairing, they open and close on her frail, dying exhalations. When the man looks up, registering Greg with tiny flecks of light across his black eyes, he gathers the straws in his hand and folds them over, sealing the woman’s mouth. She bucks once, kicking an old coat at her feet, and dies.

14 A Discomfort of Facts

Julie pulls the hair offher brother’s face. Jimmy squirms a little trying to get comfortable against her thigh. Julie reaches around his front and puts her hand on the glass he holds while he moves around on the floor between her splayed knees. She squeezes her eyes while he puts a little too much weight on an elbow that is pushing just below her hip. Once settled, Julie removes her hand from the glass and Jimmy slurps hard once, clearing the purple ice of colour. They have been sitting on this floor in a tiny clubhouse in the backyard, built by their father, for three days. Their unusually warm spring break had been restricted to the activities of penitentiary inmates seventy-two hours ago when a gang had invaded the Wheelers’ cottage. And on this day their parents had joined Jimmy in his silence, making Julie feel isolated by her willingness to talk. She exercised this willingness by telling Jimmy stories that lasted six or seven hours.

While she speaks Jimmy listens; but he also watches. He watches for germs squishing at the corners of her mouth, or viral clouds near her cheeks. He doesn’t exactly know what he’s looking for, except he thinks with certainty that at some level these tiny invaders must wear pointy leather shoes. White pumps. They’ll have dozens of fat, scrambly legs encased in thick white nylons. He keeps his fingers caged around the straw that he seals tightly with his lips.

Julie is thinking about where she left off. The story is about the Wheelers in the afterlife. Over the course of many hours they have been the rulers of the world. They are the first married superheroes, driving through space in a flying monster truck. They have been reincarnated as fish, teachers, metal detectors and horseflies.

Most recently Julie has, out of boredom, brought them back to Earth as giants who enact a terrible revenge on the living.

“Mrs. Wheeler’s huge head is as big as a truck and her arms are like trees. She stamps on the ground, squashing people. She holds them under her giant shoes, leaning against their heads until they pop like those plastic bubbles of air used in packing crates. She finds this addictive and heads toward the city centre, growing agitated because the population is finite. She finds a main intersection and, grabbing handfuls of waiting commuters, begins to snap open their tiny craniums with her thumb. She moans small satisfactions to herself. Mr. Wheeler, whose hands are as big as horses, is trying to dig the biggest hole in the world. Each scoop of dirt that he drags out of the earth could fill ten dump trucks, and when he tosses them over his shoulder they pass in the sky over people’s heads like giant black clouds. After a full day of digging, Mr. Wheeler is standing in a hole that reaches up to his chest. Around him are tall, tall mountains. Since his day is about a thousand of our years long, people have moved from the dangerous cities away from the maniac head squeezer and have begun to live in caves in the side of the mountain. As night approaches, Mrs. Wheeler returns from the city, wiping her jammy fingers on the front of her dress. She crouches down against the mountain to help her husband out of his hole. In the process they cause a landslide that kills all the people. They decide that it’s time to get some dinner and they wander off. They find a country near the equator that is composed entirely of ruffage and they start grabbing giant handfuls and stuffing their mouths. The salad contains tiny stalks that get caught between their teeth, and they discover that if they clench them hundreds of monkeys, frantic to escape, push the trapped food free. They smile at each other, their lips streaming a dark green juice that carries the bodies of squiggling monkeys off their chins.”

Julie looks up. A car is approaching the cottage. She stretches her neck so that she can see above the windowsill to where the road appears between the trees. The car is going very fast and it sprays stones as it brakes dramatically at the foot of her parents’ driveway. Julie slips out from under Jim. He drops his elbows against the wood floor. Unable to speak, he rolls his glass angrily across to the wall.

“Shhh. There’s somebody coming to see Mom and Dad. Come on.”

Julie grabs her brother’s hand and they sneak out of the clubhouse. Jim resists her. He’s frightened of his parents, more than usual.

He thinks that they’re sick, and he’s right.

The children crouch behind a large green wheel of hose that hangs on the side of the cottage. They hear a door open and a man emerges. Very serious. Mud on his clothes. Is that mud? Julie pushes her brother down and she covers his back with crossed forearms. Listen. She hears an animal, a bird maybe. Something crying across the lake. No. Not across the lake. Nearer. Julie turns her head, her face an inch from the side of the cottage. From in there?

The sound becomes shrill. Louder. It is in there. Julie drags her brother into the bushes across the path. The front door opens and Julie can hear a man yelling. Pursued. She keeps her eyes trained on a small patch of the front yard that she can see through the leaves. The man running. Mom. Dad. After him. She leaps from the bushes to the edge of the cottage. Mom and Dad are chasing him into the lake. The man dives in from the shore and Mom and Dad fall on each other, howling. Slapping each other. Biting each other.

Mom has a piece of Dad’s cheek between her teeth, and when he turns from the lake she doesn’t let go. Suddenly they stop. They see me. Dad punches Mom under the chin, knocking her teeth from his face. She trips her tongue under the piece of flesh and snaps her mouth forward, catching and swallowing in one movement. With his eyes steadily on Julie her father pushes his wife to the ground and steps toward her. His cheek has a hole where her mom bit him. His eyes are huge and black. Mom springs from the ground, knocking his limp arm out of her way as she breaks into screaming flight. Julie grabs Jim by the arm and they run down a path that goes behind the clubhouse. Where is that tree? Where? Here. She pushes Jim up first on a ladder of tilting sticks nailed to the trunk, and she follows him, trying to force the rungs out with her heel as she climbs.

Something crashes against the side of the clubhouse. A grunt. Growl. It pushes back and something else falls through a bush. Julie covers her brother’s mouth. Her mother steps out of the bushes near the base of the tree. She doesn’t look up. Her husband follows, in a stupor, walking very poorly. He approaches his wife, tries to lean against her, and falls. He lies on his back almost directly under where Julie and Jim are holding each other on the branch of a tree. One of his eyes has been pricked by a twig and the other blinks. His lips slap against the violent, soundless air that he’s forcing through them. He reaches up to point at Julie, but his hand fails, and he grabs his wife’s wrist, yanking her down on top of him. She hunches her shoulders down to his face, and with a single snap breaks both of their necks.

Julie can feel her brother shaking. In fact, she can see it in the leaves around them. Weapon. I need a weapon. She reaches to a small leafless branch and pulls it back. The branch splinters but doesn’t break. Mom rises from her husband. Listening. She turns to find the noise, and her head flops on its broken neck. Julie yanks once, hard, but the branch holds. Mom twirls to face the tree. She lifts her head off her chest and holds it, controlling it in her hands like a remote device. She spots her children. Julie freezes in the monster’s glare.

The mother tries to make a word with the torn skin of her mouth and falls to her knees. She lowers her head in her hands and little sobs pump in the broken pipes of her neck. Julie looks down at the matted leaves clinging to the back of her mother’s bathrobe. She feels a sudden compulsion to reach out.

“Mom? Mom? What’s going on, Mom?”

The sound of her voice, the identification of this savage creature as mother, opens a flood of pain. Julie suddenly feels a panic of responsibility. She leans her brother against the branch and hovers her foot down to a rung. She scrambles to where she can begin lowering herself. One leg. Another. A hiss. A hand snatches her ankle.

“Mom?”

She feels something hot and wet slide across the soul of her foot.

“Mom!”

Teeth biting. Not biting. Teething.

“Jimmy!”

A form falls past her. Jimmy drops from the branch onto his mother’s head. Julie springs off the ladder to the ground and lands in a confusion of bodies. Jimmy is sitting on his mother’s chest and, with his eyes closed, he slaps wildly at her face. The woman drags her dark angel wings through the leaves, frantically touching the ground beneath her.

Julie drives in the stake. It rides a groove of tongue and drips to a point through the base of Mom’s skull. Like a canoe gliding onto sand it rests in the fresh opening behind her, followed by a wake of lake blood. The woman shudders softly under her children and closes her perspiring body with an invisible sheen of pearls. Dead.

The woods around Lake Scugog are not a jungle. Dragons do not stalk deer up and down black hillsides. Siberian tigers do not sulk over the torn body of a villager. There are no monsoons, no undiscovered species of spider, no diamond mines. There is a snake, however, hanging, quite contrary to its known behavior, high in the top of a tree. This snake, a common garter snake about twenty-six inches long, has coiled the length of its body around the thin, bending tip of a Birch. The snake holds its strong neck and powerful jaws out away from the tree. Its tongue oscillates in the sun like a skipping rope. At a dizzy distance of fifty-five feet below is the body of a woman nailed to the ground through her mouth. Beside her is her husband: still alive, though insensible. His only movement is in his hands. They repeat a broken tap at the ground beneath him. A ceaseless investigation that will go on for days. The snake, whose eyesight is poor, cannot see these minute twitches; its tongue, however, touches a picture so complex that something closer to the future than the present shimmers on its fork. Two children run into the woods along separate tapered paths and, when the tongue slips back to refresh itself against the cool bones of the snake’s mouth, they disappear.

15 Contact

Greg can see Grant at his desk. Steve and his girlfriend are standing on either side of him. To Greg they look like a family. Grant flips the tip of a pen at the girl. She looks across to Steve, who shrugs. She looks back and nods seriously. Grant writes in a pad, tears off the sheet, and hands it to Steve without taking his eyes off the girl. Steve folds the paper and tucks it in his shirt pocket. He reaches across and takes his girlfriend’s hand. She exhales visibly and follows Steve around Grant’s desk. They walk directly toward Greg. Greg jumps. I’ve been watching you. Uh oh. Steve doesn’t look up as he passes. His girlfriend looks directly at Greg. He can see fear in her clapped-open eyes. She passes him and he thinks: Those eyes have seen something. Something horrible? No. No, those eyes are hiding something. Greg turns, and she has hesitated at the office door. Hiding something she wants to show me. What? Why me? Greg feels his skin lift in scales around his neck. She hasn’t told anybody yet. She’s sick. Like me. Like the guy in the alley.

“Greg?”

Greg jumps a second time. Grant is touching his elbow, drawing him through the brightly lit office to his desk.

“You alright there, buddy?”

Greg is momentarily confused by the word buddy. He senses the fraudulence first, then something a little deeper, something true.

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m OK.”

Grant sits Greg down and leans against the edge of an adjacent desk.

“OK. OK. Good. I’ve got a lot of things for us to cover over the next couple of days. But I gotta ask you something first.”

Greg touches his forehead. I’m sweating. He drops his hand without wiping it off. He nods quickly to Grant, feeling a tiny bead race along his jaw.

“OK. I wanna know, Greg, if anything that’s happened here since you started is, uh, freaking you out.”

Greg responds “No,” rapidly, twice, more to the idea of being freaked out than anything else.

“Good. Good. OK. Before we go on do you have anything you want to ask me?”

Greg feels a light ice cover his perspiring face as an air-conditioned draft passes over him. Question. He suddenly remembers that he does have a question.

“Yeah. Are you gay?”

Grant coughs into a fist and looks away before answering.

“Gay? Uh, you mean because of yesterday?”

Greg feels a curl bounce off his cheek as he nods. He leaves it there to appear innocent, adorable.

“Well, no. I’m not. In fact, I think I’m the only straight person in this newsroom.”

Greg looks at a tall blonde woman striding across to the desk of a familiar sportscaster who is busy clipping a microphone to his lapel.

Grant glides down into his chair and huddles under a desk lamp.

“In fact, I think fuckin’ a fella is sometimes about the most heterosexual thing a young man can do.”

Grant smiles and raises his eyebrows, surprised and impressed by what he’s just said.

“Right?”

Greg shrugs agreeably.

“Eh? Really, I think so.”

“I guess.”

“Right?”

“Right.”

“Oh yes, I think so.”

Grant waves his hand, closing the discussion. He flicks on a tiny television beside his pencil holder. He twists a noisy dial, stopping occasionally, until turning the set off. He raps the top of the television.

“This is the bullshit we’re facing, Greg. The whole goddamn province turning into fuckin’ cannibals. Oh boy.”

Greg feels a now familiar twitch of shame scurry into his heart. It dims the light around Grant’s face.

“We are living in strange times, I guess. A lot of people are going to die before this is over. Steve thinks it’s modern art. Ha. I think it’s evolution. Anyway, we’ll kill them. We always do.”

Greg suddenly wonders if he has less than a month to live. Maybe even a week. A minute.

“I wanna go for a drive, Greg. Out to the country. Check out some of this stuff firsthand.”

“Now?”

Grant reaches over and slaps Greg’s face playfully.

“Yeah, right now, sport.”

The virus that thrives in the brackish pools fed by its own leaking is becoming hot. Until now they have been rubbing each other’s tummy in the words that Greg uses, happy to wait and play in the limited give and take he so rarely opens up onto other people. As Greg lowers himself into the passenger seat, the viruses gather in all the things he might say next, braiding the wheels and filling their cheeks with venom. The car pulls out of the parking lot, and a lone figure, dressed entirely in black, wanders among the empty vehicles. He bends to examine the interior of a Saab. Throwing his hands up into the air when Grant screeches his wheels at the exit, the figure slams a fist into his palm.

16 Blue

The woods around Lake Scugog are a dense, spinach green. The people who drive past its pseudo island on Number Seven look leisurely at its peculiar shoreline. Scugog is different, unlike most lakes in the region. Angrier, maybe. Self-illuminating.

The green that pulls the highway down is interior to black, a green that has yet to distinguish itself as a colour. A nightmare of green. People who drive through its suction are often bored, tired of scenery; and they say, in order to squeeze excitement out of the last leg of their trip, “I bet if you walked in there you’d never come back.” The driver never looks, but nods in agreement, swallowing a backwash of rejected coffee, disappointed that a good argument couldn’t be made. And, finally thrilled by the bristle of invisible hostility, he or she surprises the passenger by speeding up across the bridge. The passenger’s comments aren’t entirely banal. Lake Scugog is different.

Lakes in Ontario were formed by glaciers. They were fed like babies by englacial streams, and when they grew old, shuffling permeable and impermeable stones in their stomachs, soon unable to crush the animals that were invading them, they became what they are today: blue.

Scugog, however, is a mirror. Sometime on or about the date you were born, Scugog was a lowland field, teeming with scabby foxes and country mice. Then one day an artesian well was uncorked, or maybe a ditch was diverted, and the land was drowned. The foxes lay on their backs kicking little paws into the water that covered them. Their scabs flattened into scales and their sun-bit ears shot underwater sparks as they became gills. Soon the fox-fish began to hunt eel and rat-fish.

The surface of the water, like a playing card turned face down, became indistinguishable from other lakes: it too became blue. Beneath this surface, a surface nearly vertical if the passenger were to look closely, there are monsters. Not werewolves or vampires — not the kinds of monsters designed to frighten people — but things monstrous because they live too long. Sunk up to their eyeballs in fish parts, they twist in the dark, lining the shores with a gasket of white vomit.

And around this lake, now, a growing herd of zombies is passing through the underbrush. Cutting across their path in the permanent night are two children who have found each other.

Julie leads her brother by the hand. He stumbles behind her, mute and traumatized. His feet leave the ground as he is pulled along by his stronger sister. They fall farther and farther into forest, stretching out under its slip covers, to where night is held close to the ground, underneath trees, never leaving. Soon boulders begin to glow, caught by an afternoon moon hanging beneath the lowest bower of a distant tree that peeks through a slice ahead of them. Stars hang in funnels from branches, no longer up there, but down here. Julie brushes her shoulder against these wedding veils as she passes, diving into the bottom. She slips her arms into the sleeves of rivers and draws her breath from precisely where Ontario loses its consciousness. When they stop, out of breath, the stars and moons have settled on their skin like pyjamas. They sit apart, hanging their heads between their knees, panting and sniffing at the wetness on their faces.

“I’m hungry.”

Jimmy looks up at his sister. Her eyes are racked with grief. She wipes them with the backs of both her hands. There are a thousand ways to start crying and her face is wiggling to suppress them all.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy, but I am. I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”

Jimmy lifts a small stone with the toes of his shoes. It turns sideways under the pressure and falls soundlessly onto moss.

“I think maybe you should start talking soon, Jimmy. I’m gonna go crazy.”

Jimmy finds the stone with his heel and depresses it into the soft ground. Julie reaches over and lays her hand on the back of his neck. Jimmy shuffles toward her, curling against her chest and in her protecting arms.

“It’s OK, little man. It’s OK. We’re gonna have to be alone now, I think. We will have to look after each other. I think it’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Julie drops her hand and slips off her brother’s shoe. She cradles the bare foot in her hand, lightly pumping it with her fingers.

“Nothing new, right?”

Jimmy nods slowly, rubbing the top of his head under his sister’s chin.

Except they aren’t exactly alone. Thirty feet south of where they sit a zombie that has been lost in the woods for almost a week is lying face down on a long bed of ferns. It is still breathing, though barely. When Julie and Jimmy fall asleep in each other’s arms, this creature uses up its last tiny breath and passes, imperceptibly, from living thing to dead thing.

The next morning the children stir under the same night sky that they had fallen asleep under. They begin to silently make their way to Pontypool. Around noon they sit on the black sponge of a fallen tree, and they both begin to cry with hunger.

“What can we eat? What? Leaves? Stones?”

Julie scoops out a spoonful of wood from the log. She turns her finger on her knee, leaving a lump of pulp there. It leaks a cold drool down her leg.

“I don’t know. I’ll eat anything. Anything.”

Jimmy stands up and walks over to where a diffuse shaft of light has penetrated from above, lifting an area at the base of a large birch tree. He crouches at the edge of the lighted patch of tiny shoots and reaches across it. He touches something hidden on the far side. Julie watches his hand disappear. She waits to see what he has, expecting a little snake or a plump slug. Either way she has decided to bite off a piece of whatever he retrieves. He’s only making the decision that she’s putting off. Julie imagines the frantic muscle of a living thing push against the roof of her mouth.

“What is it?”

Jimmy goes down on his knees in order to reach with both arms. He pulls them back, hiding what he has in pregnant, praying hands.

“What is it, Jimmy?”

Jimmy looks back at his sister and smiles. Then he looks down at his hands and lifts his eyebrows.

“What? Jimmy, what have you got?”

His hands open and the light falls between them.

“Raspberries! Are those raspberries?”

Julie leaps to her feet and joins her brother. She picks a raspberry out of his palm and squishes the cold fruit against her teeth. A bright sugar buzzes to life in her mouth. She bites down, cracking the tiny pits. Jimmy reaches across and bends a large bush into the light. The bush is heavily jewelled with clusters of fat red berries. Julie looks at her brother with wide eyes as he pops his handful into his open mouth. Within an hour they have devoured a good portion of the bush, and with digging, adventurous fingers they uncover a patch of tiny onions. They crunch the bulbs, dyeing the cells pink, before lustily swallowing a raspberry-onion stew.

“We can live here, Jimmy.”

Jimmy is lying on his back. His lips are swollen, in reaction to the onion, and slicked bright crimson from crushed berries. Julie looks over, past the shoots of poison ivy that ring her face.

“Maybe not here, exactly. I’m thirsty now. We have to find water.”

Jimmy rolls over onto his stomach. He feels a jolt in the base of his abdomen. He curls his toes and closes his eyes until it passes.

“Jimmy? We need water. Let’s go find some.”

Julie sits up and, patting her brother’s backside, stands. Jimmy finds his shoe and lets his sister brush him off while he ties the laces. She lifts him up with her powerful arm. They step away from the little hole of light on the ground, back down into the stars and moons, along a path lined with black sand. Julie keeps an arm across her face, dividing branches with her elbow. She leads Jimmy; he keeps his face down behind her, in the protection of his sister’s back.

Forty metres ahead of them, moving in the same direction, at exactly the same pace, are three cannibals. They are lost, and their diet, the tongues and teeth of living people, is somewhat more limited than the children’s. They are facing a rather depressing destiny. In their weakened condition the zombies have long given up the conversations that have consisted mainly of hooking fingers into vulnerable flesh. They lope along quietly, recoiling in irritation at anything that touches them. As night falls, too far above to be noticed, one of them collapses on his face. The other two, sad women with heavy masks, part ways, heading off in different directions. They do this not so much because they have lost a third but out of a failure to notice the loss of that person.

Julie spots him first. His back, lying low up ahead. Initially she thinks it’s torn paper. Then as they get closer a hand flips up in the green dust at the man’s side. Julie squeezes her brother’s forearm, stopping him behind her. They stand frozen, watching the body. After a few minutes the other hand performs the same flip, sending a twig up onto his white shirt. Then stillness. Julie steps closer, leaving her brother behind. She studies the back to see if it rises, if it’s breathing. Perfectly still. She turns and, covering her mouth, whispers, “I think it’s dying. I think it may be dead.”

She waves her hand backward, indicating to Jimmy that he should walk past in a wide circle. Jimmy is craning his neck up and around, trying to get a view beyond where his sister stands.

“Now! Go!”

Jimmy steps backward and, without losing sight of his sister, moves ahead of her through the forest. Julie steps closer. The body isn’t breathing. It doesn’t appear to be. Julie stoops to a knee and reaches down blindly to find a stone. She lobs the pebble into the air and it hits the zombie on the head, rapping his skull like a drum. Julie grabs her mouth and turns to run. She stops. The man must be dead.

“Wait there, Jimmy! I’m coming! Wait there!”

Julie runs as fast as she can. She leaps directly through a young maple tree growing a metre away from the still hand of the body. She catches up with Jimmy and holds him, panting heavily, out of breath. Jimmy reaches up and lays his closed fists against her back.

“OK. It’s OK. Let’s just keep going, OK?”

Jimmy pushes harder against her back, tightening his fists until they really hurt.

Suddenly a sharp roar from behind sends them squealing through the prickly forest.

When they’ve gone, the zombie, who has sat up, dies; his hands have fallen like birds at the sides of his feet.

17 Dealey Plaza Bums

A hurricane is visible as a spiralling structure of cirrus clouds. Torn from the far corners of the sky and gathered, these clouds ravel like cotton candy around a paper cone. The eye of the hurricane, famously calm, looks down the cone, its view descending and dry, onto a farmer’s field. Four cows and a calf gnaw at the ground in this pasture and near them a light has found its way under sea-fed walls, illuminating the animals from below. The pupil above them, darkened in a child’s pink fist, dilates to absorb this tiny remote light. It locks perfectly, developing an image of the circular patch. Five figures are visible, standing across from each other on the points of a pentagram. They are held here, less by the geometric pattern visible to the eye than by a series of physical arguments that have suspended them at equal distances from each other. A combination of these arguments acts as an attracting hub and they stand, in a quiet rage, facing this hub, unable to move or speak. The strongest zombie, a tall blond man in jean overalls, takes advantage of a momentary imbalance caused by an interfering calf and leaps growling on the upper body of a teenage girl to his left. Their argument began sometime earlier, when she bit down, weeping, against the back of his armpit. Now she is under him, shaking her sharp teeth up into his throat. He throws his head back to howl and releases a glaze of blood onto her face. The other zombies, spinning off their points on the pentagram, collapse toward the battling couple and fall. They strike back angrily, with swinging fists, at the invisible world that sucks at them. The zombies stop in a pile and lie still. The blood escaping from the large man they’ve fallen on wicks up through their clothing, darkening the flannel. The calf flees in quick light hops until it encounters the eye-wall, which rotates at one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. The young animal is driven under the descending hurricane. It scores a circle in the ground before being tossed off a boulder into a chaotic cross-current trip, up into the corner of the eye. The eye blinks on the irritant long enough to clear the sky, and the calf falls from a height of nine miles through a perfectly clear blue afternoon. It lands, like a drop of wax, splashing at three o’clock in the circle its body had previously tore open.

Grant pulls the car over beside the field near Pontypool. He reaches into the back seat, sliding an open briefcase onto the floor. He fishes a pair of binoculars out from between two sacks full of fresh corn.

“Right over there. Holy Christ! Those are goddamn cannibals! I can’t believe it.”

Grant reaches down and pops open the trunk from the dash.

“Get the equipment out of the trunk, Greg. Let’s shoot some of this stuff.”

Grant opens the car door without removing the binoculars from his eyes. They bump against the door frame as he rises from his seat.

“I don’t know, buddy. This just might freak me out. Look at those bastards. Real-life wackos. Zombies. Killers. I’m a bit freaked out. Hey! Where’s the camera?”

Greg walks around the car, scanning the farmer’s field. He can see four cows in a far corner. And about halfway back from them, near an overgrown pile of collected stones, there’s a dark shape. He can’t quite make it out. Then he sees what is clearly an arm lift up and fall against the side of the mound.

“Woo-hoo! Holy shit! Those suckers are alive! Greg! Greg! Did you see that?”

Greg opens the trunk and lifts out the camera case. His hand hovers over a plastic gas container. He touches the handle, lifting an oily film onto his fingertips. He slides his thumb across the ends of his fingers. He feels sound between the surfaces. Sound? He leaves the trunk open, just in case, and hauls the equipment around the car, placing it in the tall grass that grows along a ditch where Grant is standing, still looking through the binoculars, his mouth hanging open. He looks out briefly to locate Greg and the camera. He speaks in a whisper.

“OK. OK. Let’s keep our voices down. Those suckers are alive out there. I don’t know how safe we are. These are predators. Hmmm. I’ve never seen… Jesus… let’s… uh… let’s get back in the car.”

Grant reaches behind and flips open the car door. He lowers himself, slowly, still looking through the binoculars. He lifts his legs, carefully, one at a time, up off the shoulder of the road.

“Put the… uh… equipment in the back seat and get in the car, Greg. I don’t wanna do anything stupid.”

Greg follows the order, running his hands uncertainly across the surfaces of things before he moves them. He walks to the back of the car. The trunk is open and he looks at it, feeling a momentary confusion at the fact that he can’t open it. Open it. When it’s open. It’s open for him to open it. He lays his hand on the trunk. The weight brings it down. Greg looks self-consciously through the rear window and closes the lid. When it clicks he has to pull his hand off with force. He feels the effort as a kind of pain. He has the powerful sensation that he has had to do this, to lift his hand from the closed trunk, in contradiction to some obvious sign. As he walks up the passenger side of the car his face flushes. He feels that he has acted perversely. He pictures, as narrowly as possible, the series of actions that will return him to the passenger seat.

“I don’t get it. These freaks aren’t doing anything. What the hell are they doing?”

Grant reaches down to a panel beside him and flips a switch that locks all the doors with four simultaneous plunks.

“Maybe they’re playing dead. I can see you, you bastards. I know you’re not dead. So, c’mon, let’s see some action. Do something. Maybe it’s a trap.”

Greg looks up across the road and squints his eyes. He’s afraid. He feels the need to comprehend something complex. Anything. He tries to picture a car on the highway. Its four tires. They rotate. The weight of the car bearing down. The weight that doesn’t stop it. Of course, it doesn’t stop. The wind rises up over the windshield. The air pressure above the hood of the car is higher than at its sides. Greg feels a rush of relief. Something is coming back to him. He tries to picture the driver. An easy one. Someone he knew in high school. Dead now. Heart failure. I’m remembering him.

“Maybe we should’ve brought a gun. Damn! Look at these fools. These sacks of shit are harmless. What the hell are they doing? Havin’ a siesta?”

Greg’s relief is short lived. He feels his heart rate speed up with questions: What was that? What’s happening to me? I may not be able to even ask these things in five minutes, what the hell do I do? His heart begins to bang in his throat. This is the disease. I’m finally getting sick. Do I tell Grant?

“Awright, Christ, let’s move on. Maybe we can find some zombies with a little more life, eh?”

The car starts and eases up a hill, slowing and stopping at the top. Grant hands Greg the binoculars.

“Here, buddy, you keep an eye out with these. Let me know if you see anything.”

Greg takes the binoculars and rolls down his window. He raises the binoculars to his face and holds his breath. A light orange fuzz hovers in two connected egg shapes. In the left egg shape a tilting oblong of white floats in the orange. He moves so that both egg shapes share the oblong and he adjusts the focus. A tiny pattern of red diamonds rises sharply and disappears into a field of tall corn. The oblong is a house, back off the road at the edge of a heavy forest. A dog — a German shepherd — is jumping and barking, straining against a tether. Beside it is a fuel drum mounted on a concrete platform. On the small lawn, at the front of the house, are four silhouetted figures. They all have pipes stuck in their mouths. Wisemen? Dwarfs?

The view through the binoculars is cool. The lemon-coloured leaves on the undersides of branches are crisp. The sky is fixed through the trees in an ice-blue lattice. A refrigerator. Greg shivers.

Greg turns the wheel between his eyes and loses the field. It blurs and he lowers the binoculars.

“Hey, you know where we are?”

Greg’s left arm is swollen from the sun and he tries to brush the heat off with a cool palm.

“Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ll tell ya. This is Pontypool comin’ up.”

Grant lowers his forehead toward the windshield.

“There is something in Pontypool that I can show you. I shouldn’t, but I’m gonna anyway.”

“Uh, what is it?”

“What is it? What is it? OK, I’m gonna show you one of the little hiding spots that puts a shape to every fuckin’ thing you know. What do you think of that?”

Greg lifts the binoculars again and his vision sprays across the road. The white sky drives its tines through the hood of the car.

“I gotta remind you of one thing first, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”

Grant pulls the car over beside an overgrown road that disappears down a dark green throat in the woods.

“You are already an accomplice to a major crime. Do you know what I mean?”

Greg hears himself respond from somewhere other than his mouth, somewhere other than his head. His left shoulder knots.

“OK. OK. I just want to point that out, because that’s your licence to see what I’m gonna show ya. Got it?”

Greg feels the whisks of a broom shaking at his insides. The disease is emptying me out; is that what’s happening?

“OK. I’m gonna rock your world now, little buddy.”

Grant turns the wheel and releases the brake, allowing the car to fall down the weeded ramp. He ducks his head, as if the low branches are in the car. The sunlight dries in dark streaks across the windshield.

“Pontypool. Now, Pontypool changes everything.”

A yellow field opens up to the left and Grant pulls up onto a flattened patch of gold. The field is broken here and there by sand dunes that crest through the grass. A picnic table sits just outside the shade of a birch tree at the field’s southern border. Grant takes the binoculars from Greg’s hands.

“We leave everything in the car. C’mon, let’s go.”

The picnic table is cracked and yellow, with tufts of moss capping its saw-cut ends. Grant sits facing away from the tabletop and he slaps the bench beside him. Greg sits down.

“See that bit of ground right there?”

The corner of a small grey shack is visible beyond the birch tree. Along its side is a large rectangle of sod. The grass is cut and maintained, though the strips of green are all different. Some strips newer. Some slightly yellow.

“Know what’s in there?”

Grant hovers his hand out in the direction of the quilted lawn and rolls his fingers in a trill.

“Dead people.”

Greg presses his thumbs hard against the wood. A button to press. I need a Higher Power. He presses the button again.

“Murdered people, Greg.”

Grant is whispering, not so much to avoid being heard as to keep respectful of this place. Greg feels confusion in the pew of the bench. A church? A funeral?

“You know the headline? House of Horrors. Well, that’s one right there.”

Greg looks at the corner of the shack. A white stone foundation. Weathered boards, cupped by the sun, meeting in rough gaps at the edges. Not good. Not good for people. I’m scared.

“In fact, you’ll probably read about this one sometime in the fall. In the meantime, it’s a bit of a wholesale outlet. People are brought here, not by the guy who lives here, but by people who need to do a little intimidating. It’s used by several organizations who don’t even know each other. Who leave, not knowing where they’ve come to. A lot of big business. You want to make sure something goes your way, you just give the right person a tour of the shack and, man, things start going exactly the way you want them to. Some organized crime, of course. Some government. Not always Canadian, either. Some military. This little shack is very busy.”

Grant plucks a shoot from the wet sleeve that holds it in the ground. He sucks on the juice leaking from its slender trunk.

“Yessir. And when it gets a little too crazy, somebody sends in the cops. And, ta-da, they arrest some demented little individual in a House of Horrors. Everything is accounted for. No leftovers. The simple answers. The world needs a little something extra to keep it eager. Something that nobody would ever believe.”

Grant gets up and walks toward the graves. He steps up on the lawn and turns, with his hands on his hips, to face Greg. Greg closes his eyes. Out of the darkness a pair of snapping teeth rush toward him. He opens his eyes and lays his hands on his pounding chest.

“Your buddy Steve and his girlfriend are in there right now. You can’t hear them. It’s soundproof. But I betcha it’s godawful noisy in there right now.”

A blackbird with tiny crimson shoulders falls from a tree and swoops into the light around Grant. He steps away from the shack. He huddles his back and rises to the tips of his toes. He crosses his lips with a finger and holds out an upraised hand to Greg.

Greg hears himself through a broken staccato of words. I’m thinking this is a lie. Grant stops halfway to the picnic table.

“Hey, you alright? You don’t look so good.”

Intimidation. He wants something from me. Why doesn’t he just ask?

18 As Fluids Go, This One’s…

On the wall are four long filleting knives. Three of them are as shiny and clean as the corner of an eye. The fourth hasn’t been cleaned at all and has a crust of blood along its blade, concluding at the tip in a tiny black ball. Fingers have splashed up to grab these knives over and over again, leaving a heavy encaustic of blood on the wall behind their handles. A spotted bare lightbulb is suspended over the bench below the knives. Strips of newspaper are permanently plastered to the wood surface, dozens of bright corners crossed by black angles. Most of what has been done here has been done quickly and sloppily. Some of what has been done here has been carefully executed, caught before it rolled to the floor and wrapped. To the left of the bench along a back wall sits a long white freezer. Its top edge is browned by a dragging apron and the knuckles of a large man, like faint hinges, have stained the seal.

Jimmy is sitting in a corner behind the door on an overturned bucket. He has been staring directly at the lightbulb, trying to blind himself. The light has long stopped hurting his eyes. The brightness eating at the centre of his vision is no longer white. Long green wires whip and shrivel across its surface. Patterns of black zeros rise to the top and blot out the light in a throb before sinking back to burn off. Jimmy hears a scrape on the floor beside him. He looks down and his vision is as solid as a jelly bean. He thinks it must be an animal. What kind? Rat? The door opens, and he turns his head to face it. A dark green tower leans off the shattering scales of a gold river coming through the door. Towards him. Jimmy looks down, blinking. No light. Darkness.

“Jimmy? Are you OK?”

Julie walks over to the bench and drops a bucket of raspberries on the corner. She swings a hatchet up to rest between the two nails that hold its neck to the wall. Jimmy blinks in a frenzy, trying to find his feet on the floor. The scales that exploded through the room when Julie entered have now fallen to the ground. They lie around him in a carpet of dull orange. Jimmy extends the toe of his running shoe, pushing the scales. A large fly lands in the pile like a fat bomb and vibrates against Jimmy’s foot. Its energy tickles the undersides of his toes. Jimmy presses down, killing the fly.

“It smells in here, Jimmy. Ugh. Fish guts.”

She looks at her brother. Behind him on the wall hangs a wooden board with the prices of fresh fish written in felt pen. Jimmy has an empty space in his saucer-sized pupils. Julie walks over to him and squeezes his little shoulders against her side.

“We can clean this place up. There’s a stove, a freezer. Everything we need, Jimmy. I don’t even care if you never talk again. What’s there to say anyway?”

Jimmy hangs a fistful of shirt off his sister. Colours are returning to the room.

Over the next few days the children are busy, sweeping fish scales from the floor, soaping down the dried blood and creating a pantry of wild foods on shelves over the freezer. They self-consciously copy their parents, and Julie occasionally calls her brother by his father’s name — “Good morning, George.” Even Jimmy’s silence begins to resemble his father’s. His blunt jerks of the head — “No,” “Yes.” They become a way of telling his wife that Yes, I am my father. And by the end of the week they have created a veritable homestead out of the fish-cleaning hut.

One thing, however, is beginning to pose a serious threat to their survival. Their diet is lacking certain food groups, and because of this they are growing weak. By the fifth day Jimmy returns to his bucket. He no longer responds to his sister. A hungry fear has made her frantic. She has begun to hear things and has taken to running outside every five minutes, only to return, asking: “George, did you hear that?”

A few days later, in the afternoon, Julie rose from the floor beside Jimmy and dashed to the door for the sixth time. It opened on a man who had been listening.

Grant Mazzy stood, surprised, looking down at the girl with the burnt, skinny face. He opened his mouth to call out for Greg, when a hatchet whacked his knee, cleaving the cap into free halves. He reached up into the air as the cap halves rolled under skin to meet at the back of his leg. A second whack of the hatchet released a sandwich-sized pair of intestinal loops. He reached down, gloving his hand inside the base of his abdomen. A deep and desperate flex of muscle, still clinging, bent his fingers back. A third whack cleared the hand from his arm, dropping it, like a coin tossed from a balcony, deep into his torso. The hand turned backward off the bottom of his heart and sprang back up from a mattress of lung, landing, finally, to rest, partially clenched, in a rack of ribs. These ribs lay across the threshold at the front of the hut. The ribs were protecting the hand as best they could as blows reigned down from above, but soon they too collapsed under the silver eye of the hatchet.

Jimmy looks through the fingers that cage his face. Julie’s body is dripping with the blood of the now nearly liquid intruder.

“C’mon, George, gimme a hand here.”

Soon the bottom of the freezer is lined with heavy oblong objects neatly bundled in newspaper. Each bundle is clearly labelled in felt-tip marker: shoulder, calf, upper arm, lower back, tongue. In the days that follow, the children lay out elaborate meals on the picnic table in the evening shade of a birch tree behind their home.

At night they go to sleep on the floor as husband and wife, rocking their tiny hips together in sexual intercourse. During the third week of their residence a tiny sperm cell turns on a fatal dime, throws open the front door of a very modern egg, and strolls down the hall where his wife is busy mixing martinis. They kiss and tug at each other’s clothes until they, too, are fucking like happy children.

19 Death

Greg is certain he’s going insane. He is sitting at the picnic table waiting for Grant, who went around the back of the shack some time ago, to return. His thinking has become deformed in repetition and crude rhymes. He notices his thoughts tear off in directions he cannot control. So he doesn’t control them, including himself instead in an audience that has crammed the stands overlooking a racetrack. Greg allows others to watch the progress of monsters toward the finish line. He discovers that he can survive in this crowd: anonymous, wordless, and undetected. He flicks a seedling from the table and it spins in the air on helicopter wings that carry it to the edge of the fresh graves beside the shack.

I am never going to become an adult. A film running backwards streaks its tail around the track. I don’t even think there is such a thing. I don’t think there are any adults anyway. I might as well be dead. Greg hears his name being called out from behind. He turns toward the road that leads away.

His Higher Power is standing in the half-light. His clothes, usually so crisp and black, are white with dust. His face is streaked with sweat and his hair is hanging in white tips across his forehead. He raises his hands and gestures for Greg to come to him. Greg pushes up from the table and sees a tear fall from his face and drop into wood. It is quickly absorbed, darkening the dry pores only briefly. I don’t want to die.

“I know.”

The Higher Power is sitting in the middle of the path and Greg is lying with his head in his arms. Dust from the Higher Power’s palm clings to Greg’s cheek and a single tear is held by it.

“You are going to die, Greg. You’re disintegrating. And soon you won’t exist.”

The Higher Power smiles and wipes his wet hand on Greg’s shirt. Greg looks down and pulls the fabric from his chest to look at the smear. He releases the shirt, sighing, and holds his hand over the wrist that rests across his neck.

“And I’m going to stay with you. Right here. We’ll wait here until you die. OK?”

Greg looks down to where the shade ends and the sun blazes down on the picnic table. A white moth leaps up from the grass and curves between the seat and the tabletop, disappearing momentarily before reappearing on the other side, where it drops again, almost heavy, into the lawn.

“OK.”

They sit in silence and watch a girl walking through the forest on the far side of the shack. She drops down occasionally, pulling at something in the ground. The Higher Power points to her, and Greg looks up to him, smiling.

The Higher Power squeezes Greg’s hand and it collapses limply.

20 Nearly Well Again

The new summer sky is beginning to screw its harder caps of white down onto the forest. Jimmy is sitting at the picnic table looking down, cross-eyed, at the breath he exhales. Julie is tying a knot in a thick rope that lies across her knee. She stands, leaning against a tree, with one leg raised on a wide stump. Julie has devised a way of catching zombies. She lays a noose in the grass at the base of a tree and slings the rope up, across a branch and down along the tops of short shrubs. She stands with her brother as bait in the doorway. She has listened to the zombies at night, wandering lost, falling on branches and splashing through the stream. She has listened carefully to the quick, skipping syllables of their cry. She imitates this in the doorway with one hand around the rope and the other hand tightly around her brother’s wrist. Usually, within an hour, the children can hear the zombie approaching noisily, frantically, its cry now a panicky series of squeaks. If it steps into the circle, Julie and Jimmy run with the rope to the back of the shed, hurling with all their weight. They can feel the flying limbs of the creature in the jumps of the taut rope. They pull, battling to keep its balance foiled, until the zombie gives up. In that moment the children give a final tug, yanking its leg tight to the trunk of the tree. The cannibal is safely trapped, shaking its shoulders against the ground.

If the zombie doesn’t step into the circle, perhaps surprising the children by bursting around the corner of the shack, Julie drops the rope and slams the door. The children wait inside, taking dangerous peeks outside, until the zombie, skulking and unable to leave, eventually steps into the trap.

Once it’s safely incapacitated, the children leap through the door and disable the zombie with hatchet whacks to its shins and stunning blows to its head. The rope is secured to its ankle and it’s given a length to move with at the base of the tree. Living, a zombie can be kept for weeks like this, until its meat is needed. There are four zombies tied to trees at edges of the surrounding forest. One of them should be harvested this morning. Julie is trying to figure out which it will be.

The zombie nearest her is a short, plump woman of about fifty years. She is wearing a pale-blue cotton dress, speckled with tiny yellow flowers. Her hair is dyed yellow and gathers, like a stiff nest, around a black matte above her temple. Her legs are thick and dirty. She is sitting on the ankle of a flat, dead foot. The foot had throbbed and burnt painfully at the end of her battered leg, so she ground it under her buttocks. Her shinbone has broken through the skin. She holds it firmly in her fist. She holds her leg still. The only pain now comes from a bright band of infection advancing up her thigh, a tingling light that marks the living flesh from the dead. She notices Julie watching her and lowers her head to scowl. The effort makes her throw up in her lap. Julie looks away. Not for dinner.

The next zombie is in better shape. A little more appetizing. A teenage boy. A tiny, fresh body. He had been easy to pull up the tree. There is very little damage and he appears to have recovered. He stands on both legs, alert, with hands slapping at his flat white stomach. When Julie approaches he throws himself onto his back and jerks around the ground in a seizure. Maybe a little too lively. Julie stops just beyond his reach. The teenage zombie stops bouncing. He looks up at her. His face is twisted in the affectation of the deranged, and he makes a pleading flinch with his eyebrows.

“Jimmy, can you give me a hand here for a second?”

Jimmy is crouching beside the picnic table around the corner of the shack. He’s balancing a brown-and-white rib cage with the top of his head, onto the black stump of spine. He is tying the joint frantically with binder twine. He moves his head forward carefully, until the ribs rest against the table edge. He brushes his hand across glossy maggot heads that poke out of the back of the cadaver. A complete human being.

He runs around the corner, drops to a crouch, and slides his hands in the grass to clean them.

“Look out!”

Jimmy has crouched within the circle of the first zombie, the woman Julie had just passed by. The zombie springs like a crab from the sand. She folds her arms around Jimmy’s upper body.

“Jimmy! Jimmy!”

Julie skids into the gravel and picks up the hatchet leaning against the wall. The woman has pinned Jimmy to the ground under her. Her twisted leg flaps once against her back, spinning her foot away. It smacks loudly against the shack. Julie raises the hatchet over the back of the grunting disc that’s trying to devour her brother. She brings her weapon down, cleaving, halving the spine between the shoulders. The zombie’s limbs stop moving, but, against Jimmy’s clasped hands, its head continues sliding and shaking. He punches upward, knocking the zombie off him.

“Oh God! Oh God! Jimmy! Jimmy! Are you OK?”

Jimmy sits up, spitting between his knees. He waves his hand, Yes.

“That one is no good at all. I’m gonna get rid of it.”

Jimmy touches his sister’s leg, leaving a dash of pink zombie vomit.

“What? What do you want?”

Jimmy stands between his sister and the zombie. He points to the picnic table.

“Oh… really? You want this thing at the table?”

Jimmy smiles, a little embarrassed.

“OK, OK, but let me kill it first.”

Jimmy shakes his head vigorously.

“No? No? You want it alive?”

Jimmy nods. His eyes sparkle. A dream come true.

“OK, you little freak. Let me give you a hand. Be careful. It can probably still bite.”

The children prop the zombie up on the seat across from Jimmy’s skeleton in progress. Jimmy adjusts her broken body so that she is staring directly at the skull. Her face has been frozen in a scream with purple cheeks. Her tiny arrow of a tongue sits squatting in her open mouth, deep in her fat throat, preventing the scream from breaking out. Jimmy notices this and thinks that she might choke. He slaps her hard across the eyes. Her tongue unplugs her lungs. With a blast of breath she sprays the skull across from her with bile. Maggots in the crisp black corners of shorn tendons wriggle and turn away, vomit stinging in their mouths. A look of surprise lights up the zombie’s face when she breathes in. As she breathes out, through buzzing wet lips, she tilts her head to the side. Curious. Jimmy begins tapping the frame of the skeleton, catching the maggots that drop in an orange Tupperware bowl. He slides the half-full bowl under the table and tips it against the woman’s ragged leg.

Julie approaches the teenage zombie again. This time quickly, relying on his confusion to give her an opportunity. She strides directly up to him and whacks the blade of the hatchet through his forehead, burying it in his zombie brain. She releases the hatchet and lets the boy fall. He lies still at her feet, the weapon hanging off his head like a festive hat. Julie pushes down on his cranium with her foot, and with a yank that squawks the bone she removes the hatchet.

By the time the sun sets on their garden the children are safely indoors. They take turns bathing in the large sink, towelling each other’s little body with soft, careful bats. They slip into the light summer dresses that they have pulled carefully over the heads of dead women and scrubbed clean. Jimmy wears a short violet frock with wide straps and a tiny white pocket. Julie wears a long, black cotton dress to bed. She lies on her back while her brother traces the outline of a stranger’s hand on her belly. There is, in fact, a hand inside her, cooked and crumbling. He smiles at her. She is his one and only. She closes her eyes and feels the stranger’s hand turn over in digestive juices, fingering the tight aperture at the base of her stomach.

Through a window near the ceiling, Jimmy can see the starry sky and milky light of nightfall. He lifts his hand off Julie’s belly and slips two fingers through the strap that’s fallen down his arm and draws it up his smooth shoulder. He drops his hands on his knees and sits crouched beside his sister on the bed. He watches and listens. Quiet. A rope groans in the dark. Silence. A moth lands. A grey owl rotates its head toward the moon reflected in the window. The room is so quiet that Jimmy can hear the floor lying still in the dark. A wolf howls, across the river and far up the hill. Jimmy listens. The room swings once, turning wildly in the pitch black, and catches itself high in the bones of the small boy’s ear.

21 Damn Winter

The only thing as universal as the experience of power is the experience of hunger. The empty stomach, like an orange lantern, casts light off its panels onto the dripping walls of a cave. Illuminated there are directions, instructions and recipes, carved and smudged in the stone, potato and potato habitat. The empty stomach turns its fierce light and obscure chemicals into a camera, developing maps in its juices, even going as far as to slip a photograph into the artist’s hand. At the cave entrance the painter stands, rubbing his or her tummy with the map, saying, “Hey, I know where that is.”

When Greg arches his back, his Higher Power shimmies the man’s body up tighter between the fork of his legs and squeezes tightly to secure the gain. The HP stifles the liquid in Greg’s throat with a hand cupped over his mouth. Greg’s body relaxes and the HP presses his lips in the soft hollow of his neck. Greg feels the warmth of the lips and they stimulate a sizzle of digestive juices at the bottom of his heart. The two men lie this way, like a long caduceus, on the driveway, writhing occasionally to feel more directly the consolation of each other’s body.

Greg tries to open his eyes but finds a lid pinned shut by a thumb. With his one eye, a tall blue cone that skates across a giant white planet, he observes the trees and sky above him, eager to see changes, signs of encouragement. A birch tree flies upward to his left. Its white trunk is scored with lesions where the wet rubble of its interior has burst through. Its trunk blackens further up and branches straighten into slick spears. At this height, the furthest that Greg can focus, bright green lights wrap the air around the deadly tree. Beyond, the leaves checker the sky, filling in the squares in a grid, sharing their presence evenly with ice blue. Greg can see in each distant screen, clear and livid with detail, little blue manic dramas. A blue policeman falls off a cliff, a child wiping his nose, a woman in a chair, a wrestler snaps his shoulder straps, a picture of Jesus so cold he freezes, a pimple squeezes, hair is teased, a sneeze is sneezed, a breeze leaves, the easy… eases… keezes… cheezes… breezes…

The HP lifts his lips away from Greg’s neck and breathes through his mouth. The hot breath chills a patch of saliva and makes Greg shiver. He feels the breath like steam tickling the short hairs at the base of his neck. The HP slips a finger into Greg’s mouth and the taste of salt fills it with saliva. Greg sucks the finger hard, flicking his tongue on the crease that marks the first digit. He probes the crease until he raises taste buds across the finger pad. He tries to turn his body, to find something more, but the HP tightens his grip. In this small struggle Greg feels his cock suddenly pump against his jeans, filling his crotch with hot fluid. The pleasure spreads down his legs and past him. Greg opens his mouth and pants quick breaths around the finger, cooling it so that when he closes his mouth the finger is icy.

There are seven valves articulating Greg’s digestive system and they throb and spit along the empty string that connects them. He is starving to death. But mostly he is dehydrating. The skin on his body sits up stiffly where the HP has held it. There is too much friction against the drying fibres of muscle for the skin to slide back into place. Systems of thin, grey wrinkles show where Greg’s Higher Power has tugged and prodded him, instilling peace and courage against the coming death: body insulating body.

Greg’s vision has become strange to him, the mucous membranes have retreated into dry puckers, pulling his eyeballs back deep into their sockets. The act of focusing is becoming impaired by pain and what he cannot see with his eyes is compensated for by the drying pelt of his brain. The scenes of his addiction are being played out by leather dolls in a six-inch by six-inch shooting gallery. He turns a doll over and inspects a seam. His own hair, now stiff blond, bristles out between the stitches. He replaces the doll and shrugs, “I’m dying. It’s so odd. I’m so strange.”

Time is passing quickly, frosting its boots in the night. In the morning an icy dew stings its cracked lips. At a height of four hundred feet, three turkey vultures hang off an immense updraft and float downward in a wide circle.

Over the next few days the two men lie in the gravel and weeds. They hold each other, and occasionally one of them has episodes of anguish that cause him to twist in the arms of the other. The episodes subside under the soothing hands and calm whispers of the Higher Power.

In time Greg does die. His Higher Power kneels at his side and crosses the teenager’s arms, lifting the hair from his young, pale face. He stands and looks down at the body that is ruined and vacant and he mouths a short prayer. He walks away from the body without looking back and climbs, in clothes now filthy and tattered, toward the highway. At the side of the road he puts out his thumb. He expects a chariot to descend from a cloud to pick him up. He’s surprised when an old red pick-up truck turns the corner and comes to a dusty stop on the shoulder just ahead of him.

22 Winter

It isn’t possible to grow tired of a stream. A stream is a permanently exciting medium. Stones jiggle in its bed and roots laugh at its edges. The sun shoots Popsicles at a stream. The clouds lay soft, damp towels on its banks. And animals return from the stream shivering with a hundred rainbows weaving in their wet fur.

And the fish.

The fish are different. The fish are always different. In this stream the fish were introduced as minnows through the mouths of metal tubes that dipped below the surface. As adults they return to the precise place of their birth to spawn. They battle like charioteers through the cold water, peeling back their pretty bodies, grimacing with the effort so that their faces look like bullets. And when they arrive home they impale themselves on the sharp metal tips of pipes. By the hundreds they drive their bodies straight onto these stakes, packing the hollow with the bruised flesh of their throats and the frozen bridges of their noses. Throughout the summer aggressive water beetles curve over the openings in military anger. They extract the fibres of meat with barbed toes, feeding it up into their little nightmare faces. The following spring a glistening black chain mail lines the stream, darkening the bottom, where exhausted trout climb along, blind and proud.

By the fall Julie’s belly has begun to bell outward and Jimmy’s body is springing in frog-like leaps over one pubic hurdle after another. By November his hand is huge and he splays it over Julie’s swollen abdomen, marvelling at its strength.

After five weeks the embryo looks like an ear, or a deflated crab claw, or an oyster. The world presses its face against the meat of the uterine wall, blinking its eyes, surprised that the embryo is in the process of looking like anything at all. This cognitive reality, that it always appears as something else, will dog the little omelette all its life.

At a party in the suburbs a teenage boy lifts his lips from a flaming bong, and when the smoke clears he pulls back a blond bang from his eyes and says: “The stages of a fetus are exactly the same as the stages of evolution. First it’s, like, a single cell, right? Like an amoeba. Then it’s a fish, then an amphibian. Then it, like, crawls up onto the land and grows little prehistoric kangaroo legs. And then its tail disappears and it’s like a tiny monkey.” He seals off the glass pipe again and draws in loudly through bubbling water. The girl is amazed by this.

During the fifth month the fetus is listening. It shudders happily in an enclosed world fed by maternal blood. In Julie’s case the maternal blood has a high concentration of protein. From human flesh: the chewy muscles of zombies that she has ambushed near her front door.

The boy exhales a dripping cloud of smoke across the girl’s chest: “No way, man, if, like, a brother and sister conceive a baby, then it’s usually weak and can’t fight off childhood diseases and, it’s like the worst for the species. So it’s, uh, like part of our genetic make-up that we don’t have sex with our siblings.” The girl reaches for the bong. “Yeah, not without a condom anyway.”

Jimmy lifts a pelvic bone to his face and lines up his eyes in the hollow scoops that form a natural mask. Two wide blades of dry bone curve over his head like a tall decorative helmet. He wiggles his tongue lewdly and crosses his eyes. Julie laughs and flicks wet raspberry from the rim of a bowl in her lap onto her brother. He slaps the berry as it strikes his chest and he squeezes the juice through his fingers. He gives out a birdlike cry of anguish. She admires his handsome face as he pretends to die, still holding the tall mask to his closed eyes.

While the girl sucks deeply, filling the glass tube with thick white smoke, the boy pushes down on his crotch with the heel of his hand: “And it’s also bad to eat people. Because, well, you know, aside from being sick and everything, it weakens us if we do it, ’cause it crushes the immune system. And anyway, it’s genetic that we don’t, ’cause if we could we would’ve long ago when we were starving through the winter. And the only survivor would be some fat pig, and we would have died off that first year!” The girl feels a light-headed swirl of connection leading her to some conclusion or other.

After the first snowfall the pregnant couple stay inside most of the time. They conserve their energy and focus on the coming of their child. This is also the beginning of a season-long food shortage. Besides a scarcity of fruits and vegetables, fewer zombies come wandering near their home. So they mete out carefully the food that they do have, carefully rationing out the zombie flesh.

As his sister becomes less mobile Jimmy begins to forage out in the newly fallen snow for easily visible and trackable wildlife. An abundance of rabbits crisscross their property, and Jimmy spends hours falling in the snow behind them, throwing rocks at them, and spraining his ankles in their doorways. He returns late in the morning to Julie, empty handed and surly. As the weeks progress and they begin to hate the sight of each other, Jimmy pretends he’s going hunting and sits out of view at the picnic table, shivering in the cold just to keep away from his sister’s icy glare. Julie sits at the stove, wearing a zombie’s trenchcoat, craving another human being, anyone who speaks, who isn’t mute and stupid.

They survive the winter this way, occasionally patching together an understanding that their mutual hostility is born of their hard life together. On some winter nights, in the deep silence of the deep snow that surrounds them, they hold each other and accept each other with hands that stroke kindly, remembering. The spring will bring them back. The spring will bring new life.

And it does. With the first thaw Jimmy manages to kill his first rabbit. He stands in the doorway swinging it proudly by the ears as Julie applauds with her tired arms. He reaches for a knife above the bench to skin their dinner. Julie feels a strange clench yank at her body from below.

Every version of the birth of a child is always lacking something. Neither a satisfactory miracle nor a base torment, childbirth is only one of the thousands of aggressive events that never actually occur in people’s lives. It is enough of something, however, to put everyone on alert. And Julie and Jimmy are no exception.

Julie is sitting on the zombie trenchcoat that stretches open across the floor. As the coat soaks up the fluid that has crashed out from between her legs, Jimmy frantically lights candles along the dirty edge of the freezer. He crouches down at a distance in front of her and, having no instruction as to any role he might play in the birth, he assumes a position natural to the expectation that an object under pressure will need to be caught, maybe in mid-flight. Julie is receiving more primal instruction, and she follows each muscular cue with a howling face.

The top of the baby’s head appears and Jimmy falls backward off his haunches. The baby flies to the floor, as if shot from a gun. She lies still in a broken case of transparent veins. Jimmy sits up, looks over his sister’s body, looking for her face, but her head is thrown back and turned toward the wall.

Suddenly the baby springs to its feet and runs toward Jimmy. She turns on her umbilical cord and slams her back into his chest. Julie looks up in horror to see her baby daughter facing her. The baby snatches the cable in her tiny hand and twists it into her mouth. With tough gums on soft flesh, she clamps down, crunching the cells. Jimmy jerks back from his daughter. She runs toward the door and with a tug on the cord she snaps her mother’s hips off the ground, breaking the bond. In the doorway she makes a threatening star shape with her arms and legs, and darts her eyes back and forth from parent to parent. She screams — “Fuck you!” — emptying the contents of her lungs down her front before disappearing.

Julie and Jimmy remain on the floor, their eyes uncomprehending and their mouths flung open. Julie attempts to rise first, but she can only slide onto her knees before falling over. She waves frantically at Jimmy, who stands, trying to overcome his fear of his daughter. He is terrified of her. He is scared for his life. Julie falls toward him and swipes at his hip, sending him running to the door.

Outside the shack a pile of wood is stacked waist high on one side of the door; on the other there is a cage of ribs. Jimmy turns the corner. Sitting at the picnic table are the three complete skeletons that he assembled for company. Now that spring has thawed away their snow-sculpted features Jimmy no longer recognizes them and jumps back. He runs in the other direction, looking for a daughter who has run away from home. He takes off in a circle around the shack, frightening a large raven that claps at him before swooping over to the picnic table, where it attempts to land on a fragile black collar bone. The raven crashes through wet ribs, clattering the brittle cage off the table and into the melting snow, releasing a sweet gas through the air. Jimmy clutches the front of his mouth and gags. His sister appears, leaning on a stick and trailing a long red rope on the ground behind her.

About one hundred metres south of where they stand staring at each other are two men in hunting caps. They’re crouched down in a path that leads up to a picnic area from deep in the woods.

“What the hell was that? What the Jesus was that?”

The larger hunter looks out from under a red flannel visor. He swallows and winces for his partner to be quiet. He whispers.

“Mother of God! I don’t know. Some kind of little freak baby! Some kind of little fuckin’ zombie spawn. I swear to fuckin’ God!”

His partner shivers and, with a hand resting on his friend’s shoulder, whispers into his ear.

“Are you telling me that those zombie bastards are breeding? Out here?”

The large man draws a rifle off his thighs and brings it up his side.

“Oh yes, that’s exactly what I’m sayin’. They’re hidin’ out up here making a race of killer fuckin’ rat babies.”

The smaller man tosses his breached weapon closed with a fitted clunk.

“That thing was doin’ ninety up the path for crissakes. What the hell? Are they super-zombies or what?”

“If that little SOB ever grows up. Jesus. I think we got a goddamn Sasquatch situation here.”

“Shhh. There’s something up ahead. Get ready.”

The larger hunter rises to stand and brings the rifle up to his shoulder. He squints down the sites, pointing the gun at the direction from where he can hear something coming towards them. A head and shoulders appear to the left of the path ahead and he squeezes the trigger.

The figure is struck in the chest. It falls backward, collapsing in the bush. The two men move forward and discover the body flat on its back, already dead. They continue toward the clearing and when the raven lifts off the table with a vertebra stuck in its talon the smaller man erases it from the air with a shotgun blast. Before the flurry of black feathers falls to the ground he fires his cannon again, this time hurtling a young girl’s body back into the walls of a shack.

The two men listen to the echoes of the gunshots that travel outward. When the silence returns and the first fresh smell of gunpowder burns off the air, they turn to each other and, dropping their rifles, embrace in a tight hug, grateful to God to be alive.

At a distance of nearly a kilometre the baby continues to race west through the underbrush, hopping over logs on her powerful little legs and swinging off lower branches on strong, pliant limbs. She is making her way to Lake Scugog, where she will dive to the bottom with frog-like kicks to snatch the body of Les Reardon’s baby.

These two babies, made strong by the circumstances of their birth, will live together on the frigid bottom, near the lake’s frozen bowel, blind as sea bats and icy as eels, in a tingling rage that will last forever.

23 The Worst Winter Ever

The Bruce Peninsula is an astonishing garden. Wildlife that has fled north from the cities is squeezed cheek by jowl on its pristine shores. The dazzling peregrine falcon, great loping herons, and hummingbirds meet in mid-air. Rattlesnakes, spiky hogs, and tiny alligators wrestle for egg-laying territory on remote Sauble Beach. There are even llama that can be ridden for a price. A lone bison roams like a shaggy mountain, dragging its dread-locked chin through cow shit. And off the tip of the Bruce is an island famous for its tall, attic-shaped rock towers rising up out of the shallows. This is Flower Pot Island.

At dawn, when the sun buries the lake in fire, the “flower pots” cast their shadows up onto the flat white shore. This shadow is where night hides, shifting its position, cautiously opposing the sun, remaining sharp and wicked. This shape is identical to the shape of Ontario. Go there, you’ll see. The pots hide a little bit of night behind them as they face the sun. They look at each other throughout the morning and communicate in a sentinel’s code: we know exactly where they are from here.

In the cities there are greater confusions. As fall approaches several things are contributing to a late-autumn military mania. The disappearance of Toronto’s most popular anchorperson, Grant Mazzy; the undeniable presence of cannibals much further south than anyone had wanted to accept. Although a plethora of laws exist that might deal with a new breed of violent crime that is highly contagious, and in spite of the horrific acts being committed by Ontarians everywhere, none, not a single person, can be held accountable.

There are no arrests. No convictions.

On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. And by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario’s own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.

Besides an armed and helmeted military, the only other active organization is the hugely augmented social services, now responsible for the welfare of every living person. Among the ranks of the army any personnel who stammers, struggles for the right words, or otherwise exhibits any difficulty communicating is instantly quarantined. The only words spoken aloud in Ontario through the winter are militarese, punctuated with a sharply barked “Sir!”

The alleys of the city and the forests of the north ring with the shaking chains of constant automatic weapon fire as every one of the many thousand disoriented is gunned down.

American helicopters dangle in the sky like a Chinese New Year, strafing the fields and farmlands.

Small Zodiacs buzz across remote lakes coordinating a sweep with armed troops firing their way through the woods on cross-country skis.

In front of Big Town TV a crowd of thirty-eight people, their heads bobbing to a New York dance diva, are cut to ribbons.

A man with his hands clasped behind his neck kneels in a barn in Pontypool. One of two men standing behind him steps forward and fires a handgun through the back of his head.

At the top of Main Street in Bolton, three zombies climb up through an open manhole together and get stuck. A man on a bicycle swerves out from behind a parked car and tumbles over them. The zombies hold him in the air with their strong jaws until a truck hits them, knocking the man thirty metres down the road, where he lies bleeding to death through three bit-sized holes.

A helicopter swings out of a cloud and slams into the Royal Bank tower.

A runaway train hurls through the wilderness along the eastern shore of Lake Superior. It tumbles sideways across White River, pulling the tallest thermometer in the world behind it as it disappears up the million paths that lead to Ontario’s train-eating wolves.

A baby in Niagara Falls tips forward in its highchair, swinging a rope of saliva from its bottom lip. The suspended drool is teeming with influenza; but before the infant can slurp it back up, the baby is pulled headlong down a flight of stairs.

A grandmother in Oshawa lays the last of twenty pictures, depicting her twenty-three grandchildren, on a coffee table. The twenty-first grandchild twists the woman’s head backward and bites down on her forehead, blinding her with blood.

A tiny fish-hook is dropped into the lettuce at a salad bar by a madman and swallowed by a dieting accountant.

A child in Bobcageon tosses a full can of beans at a bear cub, causing it to bark out in pain. The mother bear lifts the child by her leg and breaks her head open against a tree.

A public poll is taken about the confidence people have in Emergency Task Forces; however, most of the respondents are zombies, and half of the pollsters are killed on front porches.

A rubber bullet fired at a school bus on Highway 6 bounces off an aluminum window frame back across a field through a kitchen window, hitting the Frappé button on a blender. A sleeping man falls off the couch.

A woman in Mississauga stands in front of her mirror kneading her breasts while a man urinates loudly in the toilet beside her. He glances over, and his growing erection interrupts the stream of urine, and he sprays the roll of bathroom tissue. He leans forward to flush the toilet and surreptitiously rotates the roll.

A stripper in the process of performing an illegal lap dance in a bar on Yonge Street is disoriented. She stops and puts her finger across the patron’s lips and says, “I’ll be right back.” She wanders out among the crates and towels on the floor and stands palming the full cheeks of her buttocks. The entire room has her attention: she fails to notice and says, “Hello? Hello?” In the corner a zombie, who has quietly murdered a dancer in the dark, hisses, “Hello… hello.”

A man with a bright-grey beard and rust-brown toupee kisses his walleyed daughter. The thirty-six-year-old woman licks him once quickly under his tongue and pulls back. She brushes her bangs with a saluting hand. Her father wants to guarantee that they are not just anybody. He says to her, as they cross a busy Saturday-afternoon intersection in Collingwood, “All I need to do is touch you with one finger and I’m electrified.”

A woman in Wawa lays six chicken breasts in a shallow pan and covers them with mushroom soup. She slides the pan onto the rack and closes the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. Two children sit on the couch in the other room. No one is happy. A man is coming down the stairs. An invisible trail of salmonella bacteria grows in strange places. On the back of a chair leg. On a fly’s wing. Strong inside the anti-bacterial dishwashing fluid.

A family is cross-country skiing out on the snowfields of Caledon. They stop and look to the north. They see four people in brightly coloured parkas climbing down a cliff face. One falls and lands with a bone-breaking snap on a large boulder. The family topple off their skis in an attempt to run toward the fallen climber. By the time they are standing again, on skis directed toward the cliff, the three remaining climbers have reached the ground. They run at the skiers with wild eyes and bloody ski masks.

A gathering of farmers, assembled in protest on the lawn of Queen’s Park, is blown to bits from the front steps.

A businessman at King and Yonge reaches for his pager and is fired upon. Eighteen hollow-point bullets perforate him, and he falls in pieces.

Three teenagers prying open a garage door down an alley at Landsdowne and Bloor are surprised from behind by two men with baseball bats who club them to their knees.

At the edge of Grenadier pond sixteen people lying beside fishing lines are stabbed by as many knives and rolled into the water.

A theatre in the woods, back up in the trees of High Park, is a coordinating centre for military personnel. Volunteers in T-shirts are ordered to stack weapons and then kneel beside them. They are shot in anger by officers with handguns.

In the Sky Dome three women are ambushed by gunfire from beneath a van. They topple over on feetless legs and are dragged between tires and strangled.

The entire Don Valley, deemed to be a hotbed of cannibal activity, is sprayed with a molten plastic.

The Toronto Islands, which have reported only rare cases of the disease, are carpet bombed.

In Hockley Vailey, one hundred and twenty cannibals are rounded up. Soldiers discover that if a bullet is grazed across the tops of zombie heads, they dance in seizure while squirting blood into the air. Informal contests are held to see how many zombies can be made to dance at once.

Just outside Sudbury, troops succeed in getting sixty-three zombies to die jigging. The same is attempted on the bridge over Owen Sound Harbour and it backfires. Eight soldiers are dragged to their deaths beneath the hull of the docked Chi Chi Man. Two more soldiers are killed by friendly fire as bullets ricochet at the waterline of the ship.

A helicopter descending on Ceasarea by Lake Scugog encounters over a thousand zombies in a cannibal frenzy. They have discovered an enclave of healthy citizens hiding in the post office. The helicopter circles until its panicking pilot, his face streaked purple with anger, dives his aircraft into the centre of the orgy.

A lighthouse in Gravenhurst catches fire. A nurse is hiding four elderly people in its lookout. She crosses herself and makes praying hands as the smell of burning gauze stings her nose.

In Barrie a defiant population takes to the streets to embrace their cannibal brothers and sisters. An emotion-choked voice blares from a megaphone, pleading for people to return home. The snapping of compassionate necks can be heard clicking through the town and army personnel descend with guns blazing under tear-streaked faces.

A convoy of heavily laden trucks snakes along Highway 7 toward the Elora Gorge, where bodies are dumped by the thousands from a great height into blood-oily water.

A hidden coyote population joins with packs of agitated wolves to roam through ditches snapping at hands and feet.

An arsonist in Orangeville kills his family in their sleep and slicks himself down with gasoline.

A throng of looters in Scarborough greets the new day smiling and empty-handed. They are all shot through the head.

A couple who have been holed up in a cottage on Rice Lake light a fire in their front yard to attract the attention of rescuers. They are shoved backwards onto flames by the giant hands of haunted people.

In a farmhouse near Orillia a widow sneaks out at night and drags corpses through her front door. The scene is lit eerily from within by a flashlight held in its place on the table by a sugar dispenser.

A zombie in Havelock leaps onto the back of a cow and looks up laughing as a farmer drives a pitchfork into its back.

In Angus a group of men lash a suspected pedophile to a raft, then send him off down the freezing Notta-wasaga river. A helicopter is dispatched to save him. As it swings along a river in the sky, men shake their fists from below.

A schoolteacher hides his Grade Twos in a grain silo, only to become a predator himself by midnight.

Four people stand under the Dufferin Gates, remove their clothes, and pass a straight razor back and forth on unspeakable dares.

A prisoner in the Kingston penitentiary slams his back up against the bars in a sexual passion that will end in the death of the man he has loved for six years.

A garage mechanic in Sarnia is shot by a stranger as he pulls down the rattling bay door.

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.

He was picked up at the side of the road by a farmer named Jackson several months ago, and by the end of the trip, which took them down to Markham and back again, to a farm just outside Pontypool, the farmer had taken on his grim-looking passenger as a hand. Jackson led the lifeless man into the cellar, where his son Harley slept, and left him there to wait out the winter months in bed until the first haying in August. And now, after an interminable season spent with the conjugating clicks of a furnace and the hug-me glow of a battered space heater, the Higher Power is woken by Harley’s alarm on the first day of haying season.

Halfway up the stairs the Higher Power smells bacon, and by the time he opens the door, heavy with winter coats, onto a large kitchen, the mould on the back of his tongue suddenly tastes of toast, fried tomatoes and pancakes. Dolly, the farmer’s wife, turns to him from an electric skillet full of bacon sitting on a dishwasher and smiles, gesturing with a greasy spatula for him to sit. The table has been extended with a mismatched leaf to accommodate a vast array of hot food. Three tall stacks of light-brown pancakes, a huge peppery bowl of steaming tomatoes, a long plate, heavy with bright-green-and-red-flecked omelettes oozing cheese. An entire corner of the table is devoted to a small city of jams and preserves. A tray of still-sizzling steaks sits between two fat glass pitchers of freshly squeezed orange juice. Jackson is seated at the head of the table, and though he’s a reserved man by nature the Higher Power senses an excitement in him today. He is wearing cleaned and pressed work clothes with a bright orange cap on his head. He is staring thoughtfully at his plate, chewing, taking care, it seems to the HP, that his long grey sideburns, trimmed and combed, stay clear of the huge forkfuls of food he brings up between them.

Jackson acknowledges the HP’s presence at the table by anxiously breathing once and pausing his hands over his plate. When the HP has settled, Jackson continues eating, hurrying now for everyone else’s sake. A leader should lead, and Jackson looks up frequently through the curtains of the window above the sink, picturing himself out there already, frowning at a series of disasters that always marks the first day of haying. Dolly is watching him above her thick glasses and the HP notices how striking this is, this looking, the peculiar distance in her eyes. Dolly knows Jackson will not return her gaze. A shy man, even around his own wife. Jackson looks back at his plate, frowning, breathing in anxiously again. He doesn’t look at her, but he knows that she’s watching him and he says, “Ah-yeh, ah-yeh.” Dolly wipes her hands on her recently ironed apron and looks out the window to where her husband has pictured himself. She leans over the dishwasher and looks out further to the acres of cut and fallen hay.

“Hope it’s dry enough, Jackson.”

Jackson doesn’t look up, and the scowl he makes is nearly a smile. Dolly steps over to the doorway that leads to the cellar and flicks on a light behind a hanging coat. Jackson attempts to look up after her but winces at the effort, “Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh.”

Dolly looks back, smiling briefly at the HP.

“Harley!”

A nearly orange dog moves off the living room carpet and clicks its toes across the yellow linoleum of the kitchen. Dolly follows the dog to the end of the counter and leans ahead of it, stretching her arm to open the door in the dog’s path.

Harley appears, stripped to the waist, his blond hair towelled up. While directing his appeal to Jackson, he accepts a light admonishment from his mother’s eyes.

Jackson shuffles to rise, with his hands circling an empty plate, and waits for Harley to sit down. The Higher Power watches Harley’s long arms reaching for syrup, butter, salt, pepper. The young man surrounds his plate with condiments before sliding clean fingers under the fifth pancake in the pile halfway up the table. When Jackson has left, Dolly turns to the HP.

“Do you need more toast?”

The HP pushes his chair back. Tossing a napkin from his lap, he reaches for a toothpick. He turns it in the air towards Dolly before dropping it on his tongue, rolling it into the corner of his mouth. All winter the HP has had a fantasy that come haying season he will say “Thank ya kindly, ma’am” often, and he considers this a dry run. As he leaves the table Dolly lays a hand on his back and places a large plastic jug of water in his hands. He moves his shoulder blade under her hand so that she can feel him. He nods, satisfied that one of the reasons he feels so fine this morning is the fact that he feels no compulsion to disclose his good mood to anyone in particular. But Dolly can tell that her guest is happy, that given half the chance he might just get past that terrible state he was in when he arrived those many dark months ago.

“He’s comin’. Aren’t ya, Harley?”

Dolly directs this comment to the HP, who feels a status is bestowed on him by her. The HP takes it as a way of positioning him in the chain of command. Not just a hand, maybe the second man. He senses that one need only be a man here; it doesn’t matter that your demons once got the better of you. You’re a man. And just by being here, assuming a place on haying day, you are ultimately tougher than those demons. Dolly looks at her son as if he’s a man too young to have demons, someone who, like Dolly, follows after those who do. The HP winks and clicks his tongue, thanking the little lady with a deferential nod. He steps out into the backyard, looking over the field on the first haying day.

The farm is relatively small, three twenty-five-acre fields that begin at the base of a slope off the backyard stretch out to the highway. To the south stands a large grey barn and a fenced-in field. The HP notices twenty odd cows gathered in a distant corner. They sit and stand in what must be an uncomfortable fit of bodies, as self-conscious as a family posing for a formal portrait. They turn their heads in unison away from the HP, in response to some invisible stimulus.

The work done on these farms is performed in the old way; unlike government-run farms, these are businesses that have hung close to ruin for generations. These farms are not about preparing animals for slaughter but about preparing families to live with what they inherit. One of the things all the farming families spread across this difficult land inherit is a deep and elaborate stock of stories about each other. Each piece of land is the public log of a private struggle, and for this reason a great deal of animosity is exchanged through the windshields of cars passing each other on rural roads. Most of the stories begin as ammunition stored and distributed against specific hostilities between neighbours. Beneath each story is a forgotten dispute, and above them are cast the loose lines of future feuds. Any given farmer’s day-to-day struggle to survive is interpreted by his neighbours as perverse. Grotesque. Unresolved. Unsuccessful. Story laden.

These stories are also the mark of membership in this community. In haying season all the farms join in a communal pool of machinery and labour. One farmer will cut several fields of hay, and another will bale them, and yet another will come along with a crew and a convoy of wide, flat trailers to haul the bales up onto conveyors that roll them offinto the black, dusty mows. This summer ritual binds the community. It is the counterpart to winter’s bitter collection of tales. The deep-blue ice of dependency and imagination give way to back slaps and bright forgetting in sunshine. All is forgiven. The good families are rising above.

The HP can see a man sitting in a tractor that drags a thresher across Jackson’s field. He has donated his labour and machinery in exchange for the use of Jackson’s combine. This man lost his combine back in ’67 after dishing out huge sums of money to lawyers. It seems that his son had come down with meningitis, and the man had the bright idea that he’d treat him at home with massive injections from the same needle and medicine that he uses on newborn calves. He has kept his son at home ever since, locked in a room that has to be boarded against his freakish strength and mindless outbursts. His wife, who died in ’73, was supposed to have been torn limb from limb by her son one Christmas morning. No one can completely recall this terrible secret, and when the weather’s clear for a stretch in early August they slap their friend gratefully on the back as he mounts his tractor in their fields.

The engine clanks off and the man dismounts his tiny metal seat. In the quiet the HP hears another motor start up inside the barn. Jackson appears on top of a green tractor followed by the baler. They head toward a field that has already been cut. The HP runs toward Jackson, swinging his bottle of water and holding his cap down with his free hand. He has to sprint to catch up with the back of the baler. After two attempts he manages to clear the three heavy bars that drag on the ground. He steps onto the platform that also drags, bumpily, held by chains to the baling chute. The HP barely has time to pull the crisp leather of his gloves over his hands before the first bale rises shaking in the chute. The HP reaches down, forcing his fingers under the twine, and tests the integrity of the bale with a sharp pull. Too sharp. The bale springs into the air. He uses this momentum to assist in tossing the surprisingly heavy bale behind him, into position between the first and second bars. He succeeds in getting the bale in place but can’t recover his centre of gravity and flies headlong over the long block of hay onto the ground behind it.

He shakes the dullness from his face and leaps to his feet. The second bale is already wagging at the sky and getting further away. It falls free of the chute and tumbles sideways. The ground grabs at it, pulling it off the platform. By the time the third bale appears the HP is standing behind it, reaching back again to the first twine. But this time he gives it only a respectful yank to encourage it along in the machine that, he knows now, is fully capable of doing most of the work. He slams the bale down beside the first, shifting his own position twice in order to preserve balance. He looks back at the second bale, now a hundred metres away, and knows that come the end of the day it will look lost and wasted in a field of neatly spaced, perfectly stacked triangles. The next bale is even less of a struggle. With these three forming the foundation of the structure, the HP slaps his full biceps optimistically and reaches over to swing out the fourth bale and begin the critical second tier. It falls on its heavy edge in the v-shape of the bales turned toward each other beneath it. The weight of the compressed hay binds their faces, pulling them towards each other, strengthening the structure. The HP heaves the last yellow obelisk into its slot. This forms an apex from which fall, on either side, the perfect sheer walls of a triangle. The last heavy bale makes the other tiers powerful. The HP kicks a heavy drop-forged pedal at the front of the platform, dropping the bars into the ground. The three edges at the base grip the earth, floating the A-frame off into the field behind the baler.

An optical effect is emerging. An illusion, one whose fidelity grows on the HP, as he creates second and third arrowheads. The field begins to flow outward in waves from the suddenly motionless platform, carrying buoys on waves that roll back from the distance. A hollow sky pulls at this figure, as he leans, in his fantasy, against the bailing chute. He raises the gloved fingers of his hand and traces an imagined coastline, as far away as the white morning moon, now a perfect pressure, light against his palm. The HP feels that he may die for seeing the field this way, and he very nearly cries. There is consciousness breaking in the soil, other people’s consciousness. A curl falling across Greg’s cheek appears in a quick spindrift of dust coming off a stone in the mud. As long as I can see the moment everything changes. As long as the HP can see the moment when everything changes, then everything in its vying is as good as home. And eventually, in an infinite cross-current of sadness and longing, every weak, blinking kindness is restored. And then, seconds later, lost. The HP feels for the first time in his short life, the millions of years it takes to produce a single, brief moment of passion.

At noon the tractor drops into neutral and Jackson jumps down. He turns off the baler and the HP realizes that in some way he has been sustained all morning by its roar. His arms throb, and his abdomen twitches. He looks down to make sure his body isn’t as huge as it feels. He feels like a perfect giant, gleaming and hard, with fingers too strong to move. Jackson stands beside the platform and removes his cap. He squats and presses a palm through the short grass.

“Ah-yeh. Don’t want it wet.”

The table is laid out with oversized plates and bowls steaming with multiple helpings of a variety of foods. A dozen steaks are bleeding down on each other beside a serving tray of ribs so tender that meat falls from the bones when the HP pulls back his chair. He fills his plate with slick, hot carrots and ice-cold beets. Harley, who has been cleaning the mow all morning, is watching television with his sister. Jackson stands, straddling the metal strip dividing the kitchen from the living room, watching the small black-and-white set. A young woman is holding a microphone under the chin of a man in a naval uniform.

“Ah-yeh. Ah-yeh. Don’t want rain.”

After lunch Harley helps Jackson on the baler and the HP is sent to the mow to wait for them to return from the field with the first load of hay. A neighbour was busy stacking bales on the truck while they ate lunch. The HP watches Harley trailing after Jackson across the field. He feels a drain of energy caused by the task of digestion. The HP walks slowly toward the barn. The younger man is picking up stones that his father kicks from the ground. He sails them through the air to bounce off an island of rocks in the middle of the field. The HP can see Jackson’s shyness even from this distance: his resignation and defiance. He’s a tightly packed, complex man who frowns when people laugh and seems never to have exhaled in his life.

The barn is dark inside, with shafts of white sunlight turning orange on the floor. The HP climbs a ladder of planks nailed across six-by-twelve uprights. At the top he has to jump across an opening of a metre and a half onto a loft. A window at the peak of the roof opens out onto the field where Jackson and Harley are working. The black rubber of a conveyor belt obscures the view. The HP sits on a bale of hay and waits. The mow is a trap of nearly unbreathable air, where waves of heat rise, cooking the atmosphere through stale hay into a gas that holds the oxygen near the roof in a dark poison. The HP is having difficulty breathing, and when the conveyor rattles to life it takes him three attempts before he can stand without support. He can see the first bale climbing towards him, and he lays his shaking hands on the edge of the conveyor belt, taking its vibrations up his arms.

He believes that this bale will fall against him and drive him to the floor. He knows that they vary in weight, from about forty to seventy pounds, and that the range represents what is possible and what is now, in this strength-sapping fire, clearly impossible. The bale teeters at the top on a brief fulcrum and falls against the HP, driving him to the floor. He kicks his legs across the sliding chaff and rolls the bale, end for end, to a corner of the mow. The first tier can go like this. The second has to be lifted. So does the third. The fourth has to be heaved. The fifth has to be built by arms that push upward, straining and, hopefully, the HP thinks, numb. At least I’m alone up here, no one can see me struggle.

Within an hour he has completed the first wall. He has begun to cough the cough that he’s been warned about. His lungs are skipping uncontrollably on a tripwire of chaff that is pulled taut inside them. He sputters up a gluey fluid, speckled yellow, and he wipes his burning lips in the black acid that coats his forearms. The second wall seems to go quicker and he feels a muscle in his back break free to dominate his dying arms. The new muscle is a bright and powerful sensation, equal to the ruin it compensates for, and when he straightens he feels it push against him, tripping a series of recoiling muscles, retrieving his arms to his sides and cracking his thighs.

As he steps over the foundation of his third wall the HP notices the light in the mow shift from orange flame to purple. The conveyor stops suddenly and squeaks backward horribly before settling. He feels the silence as he did this morning, as a barrier against sensation dropping, and gravity returns to his limbs, pulling him down towards the floor. Above his head the rattle of rain stones up off the aluminum roof. This sound, cool and falling from far away, intensifies the heat and deafness in the mow.

From within the barn below him: “Ah-right!”

The HP makes the jump across to the ladder, floating almost as he climbs down. He feels the rungs in his hands as empty spaces, their surfaces held from his palms by bruises.

The haying isn’t finished, and the rain means they won’t resume for several days. A barn full of wet hay will eventually explode.

The dinner table is twice as laden and the HP finds himself eating smaller portions. He eats alone. Harley has showered and sped off in the car towards town to drink, and Jackson is having a beer himself, sitting in a reclining chair. His daughter is colouring in a book on the floor in front of the television. Dolly is standing by the dishwasher with a long wooden spoon in her hand. She is looking through the house. It seems to the HP that she’s calculating. First, she looks to Jackson, then to the dog’s dish, then over to a fly banging against the window screen. She taps the spoon three times quickly and jumps visibly when she notices the HP looking at her. She recovers by smiling and tilts a bowl of greens toward him.

He returns the smile and says, “No, thank ya kindly, ma’am.”

She continues smiling and looks to her husband, who has now fallen asleep in the reclining chair.

That night the HP cannot sleep. He lies on the lower bunk, staring up into the dark. There is no space heater’s glow and the room is only present in its strong smells. He is picturing the people he shares the house with. Quiet, strong and beautiful. Jackson’s shyness and his intimate game with the sky. Harley’s coltish grin and addiction to showers. And Dolly. Dolly’s strange sight. She confers something with it. She sees. What?

The Higher Power decides he’ll get up and wander through the house a bit. Listening. He gets to the upper floor and finds himself tiptoeing down the hall.

I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t.

He stands in front of the master bedroom door and listens. The toy tractor of Jackson’s snore purrs. The HP turns and notices a soft light beneath the daughter’s door.

He presses his hand against it, and the door falls open.

She is sitting on the edge of the bed facing the wall. In a voice like a snapping twig she says, “Now what?”