No More Zombies It"s Friday night, so the staff allows the patients to rent a movie and stay up to watch it. The t.i.tles patients request are all meant to upset and disturb the nurses. Science Crazed, Phantasm, 2,000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead, Carnival of Souls. Science Crazed, Phantasm, 2,000 Maniacs, The Evil Dead, Carnival of Souls. The nurse on duty looks at the selection and says: "You don"t think this is funny, do you?" The nurse on duty looks at the selection and says: "You don"t think this is funny, do you?"
No one answers; instead, you all look down at her hand, flipping your list against her thigh. Her fingers are yellowed with slick nicotine tips and you look at each other. There is only one smoking room. Where does she smoke? Where does she smoke? The tiny world of the nurse hiding in the half moons on her fingernails scratches to the surface. This suggests to you, emotionally, negligently, that her people can get away with anything. They would like you to watch The tiny world of the nurse hiding in the half moons on her fingernails scratches to the surface. This suggests to you, emotionally, negligently, that her people can get away with anything. They would like you to watch Terms of Endearment. Terms of Endearment. You don"t even know how to begin to explain how hateful this movie is. You don"t even know how to begin to explain how hateful this movie is.
At the appointed hour she turns off the college basketball game you"re watching and brings a heel down an inch from H/ellen"s face. March Madness. She adjusts the blue of a blue screen with a remote. H/ellen turns her head on the floor and looks at you. She gives the universal sign for being in close proximity to a hated person"s smelly foot. The nurse leaves before the movie begins and it proves unwatchable right from the beginning. Not a fault of the film exactly; the nurse has adjusted the colour up into a spectrum where everyone appears to be wearing huge, flaming life preservers. Jeff Daniels is in more trouble than most of the actors. His character frequently drops his head toward his chest, exposing his face to the charring effects of flame. You each decide silently that the nurse has unwittingly given you the kind of movie you wanted after all. You turn the sound up so loud that the Terms of Endearment Terms of Endearment are transformed into the are transformed into the Agonizing Screams of Endearment. Agonizing Screams of Endearment. H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one. You just recycle the ones she doesn"t smoke. She has a beautiful smile. Crazy. All trouble. Never learning. H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one. You just recycle the ones she doesn"t smoke. She has a beautiful smile. Crazy. All trouble. Never learning.
Just as Jack Nicholson attempts to extinguish the fire covering Shirley MacLaine by driving an ultra-violet car into a white ocean, the nurse comes running across the room. She"s p.i.s.sed. She turns the television off, looking at no one. She kicks the air over H/ellen and flees the room. The VCR VCR is still running, so it takes a few minutes for people to pull themselves away. When they do, H/ellen and you are left alone to smoke and listen to the movie purring along in its machine. is still running, so it takes a few minutes for people to pull themselves away. When they do, H/ellen and you are left alone to smoke and listen to the movie purring along in its machine.
H/ellen asks you for a cigarette. You give her one.
She sits up to grab the cigarette, and instead of lying back down slides over to the coffee table. She looks you straight in the eye as she lifts her little dress up over her hips. She pulls the leg of the table between her legs. You look down quickly and then look up again. She looks down herself, encouraging you to do the same. The foot of the leg is surrounded by her large v.a.g.i.n.a and she draws it against her flesh by flexing her thighs. She looks back up to you and, while you are looking directly into each other"s eyes, you unb.u.t.ton the top of your pants and slip down your hand.
You feel for a brief second, Tommy"s laboured breathing. He lays on his back, sleeping, with medication applied to the sc.r.a.pes on his face and a white sheet pulled tight across his tall chest. He will wake up soon and come to find you. You concentrate on this.
This was exactly twelve years ago. Four days later you will discover a surprising alternative to suicide.
31.
Autopsy In the waiting room of Dr. John Mendez the corpses of a woman and her teenage son are being unwoven from the stiff limbs that have held them through the week. Dr. Mendez lays the bodies out on the floor of an examining room. There are already three other bodies there, stacked on the cushioned table. There is such an abundance of diving board stiffness in the people that surround him that Mendez finds himself performing loose little dances to distinguish himself. He is conscious of not being dead. He is less conscious of the people around him not being alive, and so along with his dancing he"s carrying on conversations with the cadavers.
He jigs down to a squat and pulls blond hair off the youth"s forehead.
"h.e.l.lo young man."
Mendez steps around, still in a squat, so that he"s looking across the teenager"s chest.
"Now we have no choice. We"re starting to really get to know one another, aren"t we?"
Mendez places a hand on the boy"s chest.
"You"re a beautiful lad, Doomsday Boy. You"ve backed off a bit from all this, though, haven"t you?"
He lifts the youth"s forearm and his entire upper body comes off the floor.
"I can"t believe that you"re like wood now, Doomsday Boy! Five days ago I said to your mother that little bags of marijuana never killed anyone. And now where is she? There, beside you. What a pair. Like planks of wood! Jesus has left a few carvings for me."
Mendez pushes the tip of his finger into the hard skin between the boy"s eyebrows.
"I think you were just starting to go crazy with the world - right in here, Doomsday Boy, where your eyebrows are preparing to reach across and join hands. The long Ontario boy, now just a little carving of the rest of the world."
A telephone rings in the reception area across the hall. Mendez lets it ring three times before tapping the boy"s shoulder with a closed hand and rising to his feet. He counts the other corpses with his eyes. "All you exhausted and serious people. I think I will take a walk to the telephone."
One week ago the plague of cannibals in Ontario stopped moving. The population that had been crouched in a corner, under the shadow of hands dripping offthe walls, with their own arms held protectively over their heads, had been holding their breaths. One week ago the zombies sat down quietly, the spirit of revenge, of murder, slipping from them. As the population exhaled it felt the silly relief of survival. We began to clean our parks and fields of the dead and the near dead. Slowly the province became less self-absorbed.
We discovered that while we were fleeing from vampires a giant in Texas began tossing babies like footb.a.l.l.s from a bridge, breaking their little bodies open against the pebbles of a dried riverbed.
The receding hairline of the land continued its steady progress while we were gone and the little black gla.s.ses perched on the world"s nose lost some of their effectiveness. If we can accept our recent history, then we can now take a place among the slow cells that muddy the thought of the world.
[image]
Dr. John Mendez has been called to the Campbellcroft Secondary School. A makeshift morgue has been set up in the gymnasium, and the doctor is part of a team sent in to organize the dead. Over four thousand bodies have been hastily piled in this refrigerator. Steam climbs out of the limbs and wiggles, like white worms, across cliffs of dead people. The mist becomes dew on the upper lips of faces that are turned toward the steel rafters.
A plywood table sits in a narrow valley, and on it a body is being opened by Dr. Mendez.
"Well, my sleepy little man, this is a famous nap you"re having now, isn"t it?"
Mendez glides four fingers under the flat upper lobe of the lung he"s laid against Les Reardon"s side. He depresses his thumb through the tiled pink of the tissue, squeezing out a black bubble from within.
"Oh dear, these last few breaths didn"t help matters much, did they?"
Mendez lifts the edge of the body, accidentally pushing the lung from the table. He squeezes his hips against the edge, but the organ slips through and swings under the plywood, suspended like a pendulum. The weight of the lung tugs where it"s attached inside the chest cavity and the heart springs up onto the corpse.
"Little monkeys! Come on, get back up here!"
Mendez rests the chain of organs between the arm and the chest.
"Well, you rascal, before I let you go about exploding all over the place I have something to tell you."
Mendez drags a thumbnail through a burnt crust that covers the shoulders.
"Now listen carefully: I think you must have had an awful fire at your back. And as you were opening your mouth to warn me, the air crawled in and blistered you on the inside."
Mendez piles the organs back into the torn pocket of the man"s abdomen and lays a clipboard against him. He writes the name and age of the man. Death by smoke inhalation. Death by smoke inhalation. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something"s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Mendez notices the position of the hands. Something"s missing from them. They died holding something. The last two fingers on the left hand are raised slightly against the cup formed by the palm. Guiding a shape, carefully supporting a contour. Something gentle, Something gentle, Mendez thinks, Mendez thinks, something in this place. something in this place.
"Well, I have to put you back in the fire, but why don"t you carry that little s.p.a.ce with you, eh? You tell the flames to burn carefully around it."
Mendez rolls the table on its wheels down through the valley, bouncing it across the wrists and knuckles that cripple out along the banks. The bodies that have been processed are deposited in the girls" change room, where a team binds them into groups of six. From there they are transported to an incinerating facility in Pickering. Three teenage girls, in blue gym shorts and slack training bras, pull the body of Les Reardon loose from the slivers that hold him to the gurney. They lower him, face down, onto a plastic sheet. Les shares the sheet with the leather tents of two dead cows. Mendez attempts to back the empty table through the door. One of the girls steps off the sheet, wipes red gruel from her hands onto her gym shorts, and holds the door for the doctor.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are a terrible team. Thank you."
As he turns a corner around the southern mountain, Mendez notices a dark ledge of scorched heads and shoulders. He parks the gurney beneath the discoloured bodies and steps up onto a back that supports his weight. With a pinching grip that breaks through the blackened skin around the back of a woman"s neck, Mendez attempts to pull the body down. The head tumbles out of its spot, surprising Mendez as it bounces to the ground.
"There are people in bits up here! Blown to pieces! What have we been missing in all this?"
Mendez climbs down and lifts the head onto his table.
"This is that exploding rascal"s fire, I bet."
He turns the head over and examines a piece of burnt wood imbedded in the skull.
"A very loud bomb of some kind went off quite near you, didn"t it?"
Mendez looks up at the spot where the head fell loose. A dark sink of charred bodies. It covers an area halfway up the mountain like the shadow of a cloud.
"Oh dear, a bomb blew up the lot of you."
This tarred spot of Ontario represents the tiny population of a compound on Scugog Island who had lived out their final days in a highly specialized struggle. They might be conventionally referred to as a type of suicide cult, and they lived as characters crossed somewhere between the Factory of Andy Warhol and the crew of the U.S.S. U.S.S. Enterprise. Enterprise. They had isolated themselves from the rest of the province, behind tall white walls, on top of which swung a battalion of surveying cameras. Within these walls they abandoned depth-of-self as a spiritual corruption and built of themselves a shiny, reflective surface. It was on this gleaming surface, hard to picture in the sweltering heat, that they polished themselves into a supreme medium of contact. The only thing preventing them from achieving unity with the greeting that they were becoming was the fact that they continued to live. They had isolated themselves from the rest of the province, behind tall white walls, on top of which swung a battalion of surveying cameras. Within these walls they abandoned depth-of-self as a spiritual corruption and built of themselves a shiny, reflective surface. It was on this gleaming surface, hard to picture in the sweltering heat, that they polished themselves into a supreme medium of contact. The only thing preventing them from achieving unity with the greeting that they were becoming was the fact that they continued to live.
They grew anxious to put their lives behind them, to heave the snake of longing off, to blink clear in a phatic collective, with arms stretched out flat across flat friends in a flat place. The leader, perhaps the flattest of them all, introduced them to the speed of touch, the superiority of skin over skeleton, and taught them to express love by brushing the hair on each other"s arms. The day was fast approaching, skating backwards from the future on a mirror, when they would twin themselves in a "h.e.l.lo" that the universe had been preparing for itself since the beginning. They decided that the best way to achieve this would be through a giant explosion. This day, flat as it was becoming, was pushed ahead by the speed b.u.mps of the tricky weeks preceding it. These speed b.u.mps were caused by another unrelated drama that crept up to, and under the walls of, the compound. This is what the doctor has yet to discover.
Mendez places the glistening blue-black head on the floor to mark the spot. He wants to return here later, to put a story together out of the burnt pieces of people.
"Stay here, little acorn. I"ll take care of you and your friends today, I promise."
He turns another foot of the mountain and parks the table back in the s.p.a.ce where he had found Les Reardon. Mendez has grown tired of recording broken necks, and inspired by the discovery of new causes of death he scans the mound for anyone else who might have died with an intact spinal column.
"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo! You! Up there. Something new."
Mendez climbs up to another area of darkened skin. He reaches it quickly with his hill-climbing limbs and slaps a hand on the top of a head. He rotates the head to test the neck and, finding it unbroken, works the body loose like a child"s tooth from baby-pink gums. It surfs down the slope across a runningboard of sloppy necks. Mendez bounds down the hill after it, jumping off hard chests and rigid thighs, losing his footing in the bend of an old man"s back, nearly falling.
Mendez sits on the floor between two outstretched hands. He bends them back under the mountain.
"Trying to grab my wheels, uh?"
He drags the body he followed onto his lap and unsticks the long black hair from its face.
"Oh good heavens! You"re not a burnt man, are you?"
Mendez places his hands on either side of the head and it shakes: No. No.
"A good neck to sleep with isn"t it?"
Mendez pushes a thumb on the chin, creaking the head down on its rigid neck.
"So the Native man isn"t dying like the others, is he? I can see your friends from here. Chins up, the group of you."
"Maybe the plague is just after the white ones, what do you think?"
Mendez turns his hand over on the mouth of the dead man.
"You see that? I have brown skin, not so black. Not so much like you either. More like copper, hmm? Maybe that"s why I"m alive now, sitting in your sleeping country. Let"s do a little survey and see."
Mendez rolls the body to the side and stands stiffly, stretching his back and shaking out his arms.
"Your country reminds me of Columbia, do you know that? Sure. All these soft hills and perfect valleys. Not as green, but the same G.o.d working out his favourite shapes."
Mendez turns and looks to a particularly steep rise to the south.
"So I will look for the colour of coffee and we"ll test our theory, hmmm?"
Mendez walks past his table and stares into the bluing flesh and scrub land of open mouths and clenched hands.
"There are not very many black people in this part of Ontario, are there?"
Mendez walks east up the wending river floor. He notices for the first time that climbing ropes are draped across a mound piled against the long back wall. He approaches a rope and turns it out from under the elbow that has been used to anchor it. He looks down at his feet.
"Oh! Oh! There we are! A good black skin!"
Mendez goes down on his knees and counts heads - eleven in all. He turns a hand over, extending a finger to rub the bright pink of the palm.
"Oh my. All the way from Nairobi by the look of you. Look at what has happened to you."
Mendez lifts the back of the woman"s head. It flips out of his hand and turns backwards, twisting the flesh of her neck. Mendez touches the other heads, lightly tossing them on their broken vertebrae.
"Ah well. Back to work, Mendez."
Mendez stands and, as he strolls back to his table, notices that he can now spot several dark bodies, the remains of black people, here and there across the smooth crests and pitched surface of the corpses.
"OK, you"re next. I"ll need some help with you, I think."
Mendez removes a cloth from a shelf under the table and brushes the surface.
"Girls! I need a girl over here! h.e.l.lo!"
A teenage girl with long raven hair comes around the base of a cliff. The white of her training bra is leopard spotted with blood and her white gym socks are thick with the black glue of a hundred leaking bodies. She flips the hair from her cheeks and sniffs at the back of her hand. Her eyes are a beautiful green fire, and she squints them at the doctor as she approaches, disapproving and hurt. The doctor is turned away from her and she notices that his shoulders are raised slightly in the ragged act of emotion.
"h.e.l.lo? Doctor? Are you OK OK?"
Mendez remains turned away. He lowers his shoulders and tries to take deep breaths that catch in his rising chest.
"I"m having a little cry. It"s not like there isn"t good reason."
The girl hangs her hair back over her face.
"I have them every so often, and you should too. I knew some of these people quite well, and the others, the others are not living anymore either, you see?"
Mendez flattens his hands on his wet cheeks.
"So let"s not be seagulls, eh? Let"s cry every so often."
The girl hangs her head under a veil of hair. She brings a hand up to her face and lightly bites the tip of a finger. She looks up and Mendez sees that she is frightened of him.
"I"m sorry, I"m sorry. I don"t know what I"m saying most of the time. Please ignore me. How about giving me a hand putting this big man on the table, hmmm?"
They lift the man between them and before she leaves she pats Mendez once on the back of his upper arm. He looks to her, smiling, and she"s gone - west, toward the change room.
The man that Mendez is about to cut into has lungs filled with cinders. Like the bodies that surround him in the mountain, this man represents the speed b.u.mps that caught fire at the walls of the suicide compound. In the weeks that the cult was preparing to die, a Native reservation that ab.u.t.ted its property was preparing to take back possession of the land. The Natives banged on drums up and down the wall. Some performed traditional rites and dances, while others sat to the side with dull cloths pulled over their faces and rifles bouncing against their knees to keep time. Within the walls the suicide cult kept postponing the moment they would die. They were offended by the Natives" crazed defiance of a superficial life. Everyone wanted to die on his or her own land, but the suicide cult believed that they were the only people who understood this land. Its flatness. Its perfect lack of depth. The little pouches of dust and bone that did, in fact, exist beneath the compound floor were beastly fetishes of the world"s terrible love of things beneath the surface. Depth of feeling. Depth of belief. Depth of character. A place built beneath us to hide in. Hateful repositories.
The suicide cult kept putting off the day, until finally they snapped. Filling empty drums with fuel and twist-tying together sticks of dynamite one afternoon, they prepared to die. The same afternoon three groups from the reserve crawled through the hidden entrances of three sweat lodges near the southeast corner outside the compound. Then the explosion punched the sky with a single orange fist that drove upward into a furry black glove. The heat melted the plastic coat of the forest, and the rocks, once cool in their light green pyjamas, broke into blisters. Inside the twiggy domes, the speed b.u.mps of worship, men and women poured cedar tea on glowing boulders that hissed in a pit at their feet. They continued the ritual, oblivious to the flames that were curling in from the roof as they systematically honoured everything in existence. Long before the invisible ash and tiny red pins destroyed them they managed to exceed their bodies enough to miss entirely the moment when they expired. It will be centuries before one of them taps another and says, "I can"t help but notice, but ... I think ... we have, apparently we"ve been dead for some time." His companion will look across, in the manner of spirits, and reply, "Good Lord, you"re right. I"ve been so busy ..."
When the island exploded Les Reardon was sitting on a tiny peninsula of flat stones. He had given himself over fully to the energy of his creeping delusions. He held his son carefully to his chest and smiled the smile that was, at last, important to him. Looking up into the sky or whatever it was, he said, "So that was was the world, after all." the world, after all."
Les felt the heat at his back before hearing the crack of the fireball. He tossed his son into the tiny waves of Lake Scugog. As he lay flat, dying of heat on the flat stones, Les saw a tiny form surface and lift his son"s head above the water.