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?”
AFTERWORD
When we began to look at putting out a new edition of this book, my editor and friend Michael Holmes asked me if I wanted to change anything. It hadn’t occurred to me that that would be part of the deal. Change it. I dug through some bookshelves to find a copy and cracked it open. Would I change anything? Really? As I read through the first few pages I realized that, no, I wouldn’t change anything — I’d change everything. It is not the book I would write today. I’m not the person who wrote this book. I remember him. He had just graduated with a degree in semiotics, which is to say he was insufferably preoccupied with literary malformations. He didn’t actually expect anyone to read it and he held this to be the book’s best virtue. He wanted to magnify the least recognizable parts of his thoughts and feelings. Not just a sketch book, but something far, far less. He wanted to write an “instead,” or an “in case.” “Instead” of a first novel. “In case” one day there might be something to say. “In case” I ever decide to write a book. It’s a place where a book might have been written. And so, and this is the aggravation of the book, and, indeed, the arrogance of the damn thing, it didn’t have to ever be a good one. When I read it and think, oh no, you shouldn’t have done that, and this part can’t work like that, I have to remember, it never really guarded itself against “bad” or “wrong” choices. And so, now that I have been asked to write this afterword, I realize it has to be an apology, not for the book, which can’t be helped, but for that fact that I was unfaithful to its first virtue: I have asked you to read it, and now, sitting here at the end, I am telling you that it might be a mistake that you did.
The process of turning this into a film, which is the impatient opposite of everything the book thinks it is, brings me closer, alas, to the writer I am today. In the ten or so years leading up to the script Bruce would finally shoot, I wrote, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, dozens of scripts. In fact, now that it is done, I am still writing sequels. The irony of Pontypool, for me, is that it isn’t the thing I wrote in case I wrote; it’s the only thing I ever write. The film bears little resemblance to the novel. How could it? There is a long line of former producers to the project who argued against my involvement, but, though I often suspected they were right, I think in the end I was the right person, because no one had a lower regard for this infuriating book than myself. I felt great energy in tossing the book aside. I wanted something new. Something that worked. Something like work.
The first day of shooting was completely harrowing for me. I had been re-writing for years and had grown quite used to the luxury of always getting another shot. I think after years of Guided by Voices addiction I had developed Bob Pollard syndrome: if you don’t like this one, I got four thousand more in a suitcase under my bed. Sketches, loose wet pages and photos. The lake. Plenty more where they come from. But when Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle stood there, heads full of memorized lines and feet firmly on their marks, I knew that, marvelously and terribly, sometimes things are finished. In the mornings I would go over the day’s lines and grow frantic that they were awful — because of course they were. Every line is always awful. And then I’d trip and bounce around the set, all the busy people who didn’t know how badly the script was failing them, and find Bruce, who I could never tell this to. I’d seek out Stephen and Lisa who were enjoying the script far too much to be of any use. The producers on the other hand were so superstitious of uncertainty that I think they avoided me with cat-like sense. And then Bruce would call “action” and it was too late, and silence fell and everyone started to focus. Focus! Focus is the last thing we need. We need blurry and unknown and unfinished. We need palimpsest and stick figures and many, many more meetings. I stood there, clammy and guilty and waiting for someone, anyone, to realize how desperately we needed a re-write. Then the scene began, a kind of unassuming feeling to the dialogue. It seemed natural and I watched as these two people began their day. Pouring coffee. A little chit-chat. And this was it. By some strange and miraculous process, in spite of the claw marks across the page, these two actors had finished it. It was a thing. It was people on a specific day. People who really had no idea what was coming. This was not what I thought I had written at all — this was actually very good. I relaxed and drew myself up. I was the writer and this was the good movie he had written. Just then one of the PAS walked by me and out of the corner of his mouth he said to the prop person, “They let the writer on the set?” It was meant to be funny, but it’s a cliché I found myself embodying: a destructively self-conscious child in a room of shopworn adults. The shoot went quickly and I did rewrite daily as it turned out; in fact, I rewrote the ending the night before we shot it, perhaps because I was getting comfortable with the idea that no matter what I wrote there was a company of fine people invested in making it work. For a writer that is a massive advantage. Years of fighting and flirting and arguing and despairing had somehow transformed into a giant tent of people co-operating with an idea. A tremendously humbling sensation and, looking back, a striking refutation of that book I wrote back there. The book you just read.