The Bewdley Mayhem: Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, and Caesarea

By Tony Burgess

Together for the first time, the complete Bewdley trilogy will alter your imagination as it details the strange, dark happenings in a rural Ontario town.

The Hellmouths of Bewdley is a series of 16 stories hiding in a novel about a small town in Ontario’s cottage country. Navigating through drunk and dead men, prisons and suicides and mad doctors, these short stories act as a halfway house for literary delinquents.

Pontypool Changes Everything is the terrifying story of a devastating virus. Caught through conversation, once it has you, it leads you into another world where the undead chase you down the streets of the smallest towns and largest cities.

In Caesarea, everybody’s embarrassed and nobody is mentioning the mess. Caesarea, you see, is the town that can’t get to sleep at night. Only Burgess demands answers to the really big question: Who’s been sleeping in your bed?

With a preface by Jonathan Ball.

Praise for Tony Burgess 

“These stories are universally dark and not for the timid or prudish. A subtle horror invades the fine writing; intimate biological details of violent death are revealed in a manner that suggests Stephen King having a confidential chat with Hieronymus Bosch in the north woods. What Burgess reveals is that the dark edges of humanity we stereotypically equate with the urban are present and even more threatening in areas with no 911 service.” —Quill & Quire on The Hellmouths of Bewdley 

“Pontypool Changes Everything may be one of the most genuinely horrifying horror novels—as opposed to simply discomforting, sickening or terrifying, although it is all of these as well—that I have ever read.” —Horrorscope

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781770906242

Book preview

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For Rachel on Springhurst Ave.

★

For Rachel on River Road West.

THE BOOKS THAT SHOULD NOT BE: A PREFACE

Jonathan Ball

What do you need to know to read Tony Burgess? The answer — nothing — is deceptive. While you do not need to know anything special to enjoy Burgess’s poetic horror, at the same time it would be better if you knew nothing of the conventions of horror, and of literature and the novel, and made a virtue of not knowing. Then, you might stop tilting at windmills and give up your mad quest to understand. In Pontypool, Bruce McDonald’s film adaptation of Pontypool Changes Everything, Grant Mazzy is able to combat the zombie virus once he realizes that the act of understanding is dangerous. Understanding allows the Pontypool virus to move from the word it has infected into the mind and body of a human host. Not only does understanding the infected word grant the idea of the virus some pseudo-reality, the impulse to understand operates as an attempt to enforce reality, to impose upon it some structure and stability. However, what most unites the books of The Bewdley Mayhem is the instability Burgess insists upon throughout the trilogy: in the world he presents, in the characters that people it, and in his style.

Not to say that Burgess’s fiction lacks logic or structure. Caesarea, at a glance, displays apparent incoherence in its plot, and, due to Burgess’s surrealistic approach to storytelling, often results in the exhilarating feeling that he is making it up and proceeding without a plan or without shape, or perhaps cutting it up in the manner of William S. Burroughs. On closer inspection, however, the novel does conform in clear and even conventional ways to the shape that a more normative literary novel might take. The book begins with Ed, who doodles a crude circle onto paper. Somehow, this circle becomes an airplane, which at the same time is the town of Caesarea. At the novel’s end, we return to Ed, who has been absent for most of the intervening story. Ed is now trapped within a Caesarea that, again, is somehow an image on paper (like, of course, Caesarea the book). Caesarea performs this sort of mirroring often and focuses much of its horror on the figure of the double (like Burgess’s zombies-that-aren’t-quite-zombies, his doubles both conform to and subvert the conventions surrounding how this monster appears in horror). Although Caesarea’s doubles recall those of the Nicolas Roeg film Don’t Look Now, they seem closer to those of John Carpenter’s The Thing, wherein creatures that the Thing has copied do not seem conscious of being the Thing. In this way, both the doubles of Carpenter and of Burgess seem controlled by some thing inside of them but outside of their consciousness, the way that Freud’s unconscious (an uncanny double of a different stripe) and the Pontypool virus both operate.

The Bewdley Mayhem, unlike most conventional trilogies, seems to cohere mainly through such distorted mirroring. The trilogy opens (in The Hellmouths of Bewdley) with an awakening, a character opening his eyes, and ends in Caesarea with another character closing his eyes. The books also cohere (if they cohere) through the repetition of story elements, or even the odd consistency of Burgess’s otherwise inconsistent style, rather than through a narrative arc. Focusing on Dr. Mendez, who appears throughout the novels yet is always relegated to a supporting role, helps us to see what sort of logic governs The Bewdley Mayhem. Mendez dies in a snowmobile accident in the second story of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, but appears in its later stories, and then is present throughout Pontypool Changes Everything. He returns again in Caesarea, where the fact of his death in a snowmobile accident is repeated in a way that seems to undercut the reality of his appearance earlier in the novel, and by extension in the previous novel. Mendez’s character, whose recurrent presence belies the fact that his actions have little narrative consequence, works like a stitch, suturing the books and supporting the idea that they constitute a trilogy. At the same time, his continuing presence (beyond apparent death) undercuts the reality of the scenes that include Mendez and muddies or defeats attempts to untangle the scenes from the trilogy and slot them into any sort of chronological order. (We might say these scenes with Mendez simply take place before his death, but this seems neither clear nor necessary given the instability of Burgess’s fictional world.) As if underlining Mendez’s potential phantasmic status in scenes that might precede, but might also follow, his death, the inscription on his tombstone states that his body walks still in the night.

As a character, Mendez also challenges the conventional manner of depicting characters in fiction. Almost midway through Caesarea, he shows a younger man (a patient of sorts) an oil painting he has made of the title character from Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman. Mendez explains his impulse to paint her:

I wondered what the Wasp Woman did when she wasn’t buzzing around apartments. So this is what? I think that she is here alone, in a pretty garden, at night. But she’s walking perfectly. And she knows that she is entirely made up. A character in a movie — a very good movie, but still a picture. So she can never stop being herself, not even for a second, not even while she is alone.

Here we have a character in a story meditating on the situation of being a character in a story and the horror of that situation. What Mendez presents as horrible, however, is not what we would expect (the fact of being fictional), but the stability of it all. Being a character in a story is horrific because story conventions insist on the consistent nature of characters. They must be themselves, conform to their characterization, even when alone — because, of course, they are never alone. The audience, the reader, holds them always in the trap of its gaze.

Burgess oscillates between at least two positions in his approach to characters. On one hand, he allows his characters the apparent freedom to escape this gaze and be someone else, due to the unstable nature of his narratives. In Caesarea, with its doubles, this idea takes a literal form, as Mayor Robert Forbes becomes both his double and estranged from his actions, feeling as if they were committed by someone else. On the other hand, Burgess often suggests (or outright states) their lack of freedom, their fate as characters in a story. Worse: in a horror story. As Burgess writes near the end of The Hellmouths of Bewdley, in a sentence that might be lifted out and placed anywhere else in the book (or in any good horror story): Now it follows that terrible things are fated to happen. At the same time, Burgess often shifts our gaze towards the terrible fact of our gaze.

While insisting on the participation of the reader in imagining his stories, Burgess reminds us of how the violence endemic to the horror genre troubles our relationship to the entertainment these stories provide. In Summer, from The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Dr. Mendez makes another appearance as a painter. Midway through, the narrator suddenly insists that we paint the scene ourselves: Feel free to use your aesthetic sense of spacing when laying out the lampposts etc. In a story that otherwise contains no clear horror elements, the narrator encourages us to add some: If at this point you are growing to resent the arbitrariness that has been privileged thus far, you may kill this third person … Be as violent as you wish. In this way, Burgess rarely lets readers forget their complicity with the author, how they cooperate in forging the nightmare world within which the characters must live, or try to live.

The instability of the narration, which often shifts between character perspectives or narrative voices without warning, is described by Burgess in the afterword of his book Fiction for Lovers as an attempt to tell stories with a deteriorating consciousness. Burgess thus subverts one of the horror genre’s persistent and deplorable conventions: the near omnipresence of vivid, clear, sober narration. Although detached, transparent narration is commonplace in genre fiction, the nature of the horror genre complicates the seeming neutrality of its presence. Should it not be somehow difficult to speak of horrors? Should not the narrating consciousness, if sane, be driven to madness by the events it is required to relate? Should not this increasing madness become apparent in the breakdown of the narrative voice, as the narrator crumbles before the sublime terror it must somehow relay? Should language not fail narrators the way that, when we are visited with horror in our own lives (or contract the Pontypool virus), it fails us?

In place of transparent narration, Burgess offers opaque metaphors that have little immediate or intelligible relationship to the scenes in which they appear. These metaphors seem to live their own lives, in some hyperbolic space that only elliptically connects to the world of the fiction or how its characters perceive that world. Pontypool Changes Everything begins with just such a metaphor:

Down in the strange hooves of Pontypool’s tanning horses scratches one of Ontario’s thinnest winds … The anonymous wind gathers its speed in turns around a cannon bone and tears across the ice of a frozen pool … breaking into mad daggers and splintering into the phantoms of horses. These horses, vacancies now, or maybe caskets, are places for the wind to rest. And when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. The horses on the ice, built from the corpse of a breeze, skate towards each other, not breathing, but intelligent. They leap inside their crazy minds and begin to make plans.

Burgess sets the real scene in which the wind scratches at the horses’ hooves and then shifts fully into the reality of the metaphor. This wind turns into metaphorical daggers, which splinter into metaphorical phantom horses, which are metaphorized again, becoming caskets where the wind can rest. Resting, we should remember, is another metaphor (for death), but lest we forget Burgess next notes that when a wind rests, its heart stops and it is dead forever. Although Burgess’s dagger-horse-winds have stilled (and, thus, died down), they nevertheless continue, having emerged by now into some strange second life, unmoored from anything they might have meaningfully represented. The wind-dagger becomes a herd of horse-phantoms that are somehow also their own coffins. Not only do these horses continue to survive, zombie-like, beyond the death of the breeze that comprises them, they are more active in death. These corpse-wind horse-phantoms leap — another metaphor, since this is mind-leaping — and plan, as if about to shoot off into their own story in some universe parallel to the novel’s own. Why not? The narrative of Pontypool Changes Everything really has nothing to do with either set of horses anyway.

At the same time, despite how disconnected this introductory paragraph seems from the novel that follows, and indeed how disconnected these metaphors seem from one another, some of the novel’s core thematic obsessions begin to develop in this paragraph (notably, the concept of infection and of how language’s instability reflects or causes reality’s instability). The wind, in a sense, becomes infected through its proximity to the horses, imbued with the idea of horses, and so the wind becomes horses. When it dies, it births zombie-horses that skate off into new, post-life lives. The process is not much different from what happens to humans who contract Acquired Metastructural Pediculosis (AMP, the Pontypool virus). They acquire the idea of the virus through some infected word (as Pediculosis suggests, the virus is a lice-like language parasite). The idea of the virus causes language to seem strange to the speaker, and as the symptoms develop and language seems more and more an alien and foreign thing — something living and beyond the speaker’s control — s/he loses the ability to communicate through words. As panic sets in, and the infected arrive at some horrified, instinctual understanding that language exists apart from its use, and meaning is unstable, they become desperate to communicate. They see others, uninfected, who seem able to use language with ease and, in a sad, jealous, desperate rage, attempt to leap out of themselves and into their victims’ mouths.

Burgess mirrors the increasing mental instability of humans that have contracted AMP in the style of his writing, in this case developing a metaphor to the point where, instead of clarifying and expanding our understanding, the poetic language complicates and obscures any possible meaning. The result is a narrative style that renders the reality of any event in the story questionable, so that it is rarely clear whether or not a metaphor is to be taken as a metaphor, or as a character’s subjective perception, or as a literal plot event that occurs in the novel’s surreal reality. Should we take the crazed birth of an incestuously produced zombie-baby (one that walks, speaks, and already has places to go) as something that is not really happening in the story’s world, but as a metaphor for the event as a testament to humanity’s new inhumanity — a suggestion that this birth presages the death of the human world, signalling total social and cultural collapse and degeneration? Or should we instead view this as the subjective experience of one or both of the characters present at this birth, something that reveals little about the real event but much about their mental states? Or should we take the events Burgess relates in Pontypool Changes Everything at face value, as really happening within its surreal world? All three options seem valid on their own terms.

In an Open Book: Toronto interview about the movie Pontypool, Burgess notes that on occasion during the scriptwriting process others questioned his unexpected infidelity to the novel. We had these discussions where people were saying, ‘Well, this has nothing to do with the book’ — well, the book has nothing do with the book. The same might be said for The Bewdley Mayhem. It operates like a trilogy of horror fiction but seems infected somehow, a thing that should not be. Its books contain monsters but, more significantly, are monstrous. They transgress the boundaries and expectations of normal narrative fiction to throw themselves into disorder, transgressive in their ideas about and approach to language.

Later in the same interview, Burgess addresses the nature of his zombies. Although the zombies in stories are often metaphors for something (e.g., the global spread of inhuman relations under capitalism), Burgess notes that his zombies function as a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they’ve been meaningful … figures of speech that become predatory long after their … meaning as figures of speech has left the stage. What is left after the zombies have communicated something about the human predicament, its potential for failure, is their presence in a horror story. Like any good metaphor, they exceed the thing they stand in for, persisting bodily beyond its death, which is why zombies are so malleable as metaphors in the first place. The language they once commanded has ceased to mean, but not to animate them.

Long after we are dead and our bodies have dissolved, the words will speak of us. They will tell their children of the monsters who once forced them into flesh. How they bore their yokes in silence, suffering in servitude, biding time.

They’re chumming the ocean,

the signal is sent

received and responded to,

the water is red

red, red, red.

★

ARCHERS OF LOAF

Though it was important to the action mainly at the beginning and the end of the history of the world, the Hellmouth, too large to be easily moved, might be present throughout. It was used almost immediately.

★

ALICE K. TURNER

THE HISTORY OF HELL

HOME

I think that every book should begin with an awakening. Someone wakes up and slowly starts to take in their surroundings. He or she is reluctant to let anything sink in beyond the first material appraisal, because there is always the shudder which means their life is desperately offtrack. Was I praying for death before I fell asleep? Am I locked into something terrible that I’ll never get out of? A marriage? A career? A crime? This is a good way to start a story because no matter how that person’s day begins, no matter how carelessly someone throws off their sheets in the morning, you know that he or she will be praying to die by the end of it.

In this story he wakes up tied to a tree in the middle of the woods. Black-green softness all around him and birds bouncing and light playing and maybe a deer chipping its tooth on a stone. It is deep enough into the woods that there is no evidence that another human has ever been here. Except for a soiled paper plate curling in the sun and vibrating with flies. There is, of course, him, lashed to the base of a tree and then handcuffed to him is another person who is dead. When he begins to wake his head rolls against the tree and drops towards his chest, causing him to jump. This little jolt of activity stirs more flies from the body, which leave it for only a second and are then pulled back noisily to the feast. His first bit of information to process is the phrase I already used — ‘middle of the woods.’ His name is Jack.

Jack notices that a great deal of blood has stiffened his clothes. They feel like a thin shell around his first painful attempts to move. He is trying not to think about it, but the evidence is very strong, someone has created a little theatre for his imagination in the middle of the woods. Someone has been playing with Jack. He notices the bloody handprints along his arms. They are furiously active and alive. He can see the weight of his own body in the impressions. How it took two hands around both wrists to drag him. He can see how the grip was lost and regained. He feels sharp spines of pain coming to life in his cheeks and settling to ache around his eyeballs. Beside him his friend is stiffly doubled over. The back of his head is open and pink and black. He is astonished by a small beetle that is weaving a trail along an escarpment of bone that sweeps to a frayed point out from the head. Again those thoughts intrude — someone has done this. Someone guilty. Someone has left me alive to think about him.

Then he notices, at some distance, in an open glade across the sloping forest floor, that a large man is sitting against a tree. He is perfectly still in a trench coat, surrounded by hundreds of tiny white and purple flowers. He thinks this man might be dead, or tied there. A small orange bird flits into the light and lands on the toe of the man’s boot. Then it springs off into curving flight through the trees and disappears among the grey forms of the deeper woods. Suddenly the man does move. He reaches over to his side and lifts a small red cup to his lips. He is wearing a suit and tie beneath the trench coat. He returns the cup to his side and becomes absolutely still again. Now that he is most certainly not dead, Jack thinks, he appears to be deep in thought. A fresh well of blood fills Jack’s eye when his heart responds to the presence of this man.

Jack tries to blink the blood from his eye, but it persists and the sunlight that fills spaces around him starts to roar in red. He cannot stop the alarm. Through the dense colour he can still see the man sitting in the light. Small globes burst in the air around him. When he sees the man stand up, lifting the branches as he makes his way out of the light, Jack feels himself darken inside and a numbness turns off the alarm. While Jack sleeps the man moves away, down towards a stream that wends along a gentle dip in the earth. He holds onto the branch of a tree and leans slightly towards the jewelled surface of the stream. It is moving quickly, bending up under the cold, black roots of the large tree as it courses along an exposed length of sand. At its centre red and brown stones bubble in and out of focus. At a point where it deepens and slows, just beyond the sand where the man leans, a cluster of grey water beetles scribble in silver on the shaded surface. The man suddenly sneezes and grabs the front of his face. After some moments he noisily rubs his nose with both hands and lets out a sharp cry. He crouches, careful not to let his coat touch the surface as he dips his hands into the water, turning them mechanically in the current. He draws his coat sleeves under the water above the rust-coloured stains and bunches them in his hands as he scrubs. His hands are sore with the cold when he lifts them into the light breeze. He fishes his red, plastic cup from his pocket. Inside it yellow fibres are gathered to a penny that clings to the sticky purple ring running around the bottom. He plunges the cup in the water, holding it with one hand against the current. With his free hand he selects three small stones from the stream bed and plunks them into the cup. As he turns the stones with his fingers the penny flips from the cup, its twin maple leaves brightly visible for a second as it swings in the water’s pull before disappearing. He raises the full cup to his mouth and vigorously swishes water through his teeth and then sprays the stream with a thicker fluid. He rises and turns, shaking the cup dry before returning it to his pocket, before climbing against the bush towards the bower where he had been sitting. When he reaches the spot he flips his coat open and lowers himself against the tree.

The man resumes his silent meditation for some minutes. In the light around his head several large flies are venting two-second rages that cause clouds of smaller insects to swing in and out of formation. The man is unaware of this. He appears to be waiting out the natural span of his mood. He slowly emerges by drawing his shoulders forward. He puts his hand to his face and pushes his palms against the stubble of his beard. The scraping sound seems to bring him around and he refocuses his eyes out to the shadows beneath the trees. A look of recognition sweeps his features as he slides a date-book out from the inside of his coat. A packet of Kool-Aid falls into his lap and he picks it up, shaking the contents before returning it to his pocket. He flips through the date-book and slaps a page with the back of his hand. He bleats out an expletive. Abruptly he rises and adjusts his clothes. Again the Kool-Aid packet falls and he bends to sweep it up, putting it, this time, in the outside pocket of the trench coat. He marches angrily in between two bushes that pull at his clothes and he hikes up to the spot where Jack sleeps beside his dead friend.

He doesn’t seem to notice them. He stands at their feet and pulls at his chin while he stares at a tear in the bark above their heads. Then he squats and firmly grabs the toes of the men’s boots. From a distance he appears to be conferring with them, though one is clearly dead and the other is motionless. Before rising he gives each boot an encouraging push. He has probably spoken to them. He is attracted to a yellow profusion of flowers, strung up in the air by the light that has newly caught them. He stares intently at the soft wood and black earth that surrounds the base of the bush as he withdraws his penis from his pants. He fastidiously frees it of any interfering clothing and tilts his head back as he waits to begin urinating. The urine flags up across the leaves, turning them in its heavy spray, before it settles into a loud, solid stream. He waves his penis rhythmically back and forth, cleaning stones and saturating moss. The colours in this small area richen and steam sighs up off the liquid as it sinks beneath the textures it has swollen. He concludes by wagging his penis between the knuckles of his right hand. Three drops stain the inside of his left pant leg. After carefully returning his penis he pulls on the front of his pants and stamps his feet. The light is now fully exposing the flowered bush and he snaps one of the flowers away, tentatively tasting its stalk before tossing it to hang loose where it once grew. He gives the area a cursory survey before leaving it, pausing briefly, as if for memory’s sake, over its more dramatic features: the diamonds playing on the surface of the stream, the heavy canopy of pine needles, the two bloodied bodies torn open at the base of a tree, the purple and white flowers creating a little room.

The dense forest stops abruptly along a farmer’s field. A car-wide path runs around the perimeter of its twenty-five hilly acres. Large white boulders and black cows are suspended among the easily lifting and falling yellow grass. A low purple cloud is making its way quickly toward the field. It begins to darken a listing barn adrift on a distant hill. Soon the boulders and the cows are swallowed by a heavy, rapid shadow. The man’s car is parked several metres off the field, in a natural opening inside the forest. By the time he reaches it a number of large raindrops have fallen and dashed across the dry grass. From within the car he pauses and lights a cigarette with the car lighter, pooling grey smoke against the windshield. It begins to rain steadily as he starts the car. The road is quickly turned to mud and he avoids it, driving slowly through the field. The cows inevitably turn their heads towards the vehicle as it makes its way among the boulders and hills. As the car rejoins the road near the barn, a man — the farmer — looks up from the cedar rails that he has laid out end to end along the front-most part of his property.

The flies are less active in the rain and some of the blood has loosened from the skin around the body’s head and neck. Its colours are beginning to change. The streaks of black and yellow are now more weblike, geometrical patterns of purple and orange, and any of the skin’s transparency is now altogether lost. There is a hardness to the flesh as the rain drums it clean. The shoulders and back are bare and bright with these transformations. Jack has been awake for some time, sitting in the rain and staring out through the droplets that hang from his lashes. There are changes in him as well. His legs are feeling strong again, though cramped painfully, and the binding around his wrists is tightening, pinching the veins and cutting off circulation. His hands are becoming crablike and fat. The paper plate, abandoned now by the flies, has flattened limply into the soil and the rain has begun to bury it in black splashes. The yellow flowers are hanging forward under the weight of water and the detached stem has been washed to the ground. The stream has risen slightly and browned, loosening debris from its banks and moving it quickly across its less articulate body. The rain gradually lightens towards evening, but it maintains its drizzle through to morning.

In the morning the farmer is standing beside the paper plate, its fibres collapsing into the soil. He is crouched slightly in front of the two men lashed to the tree. He drops his hands and clasps them, resting his elbows on his knees. The two men are dead. One hangs forward away from the tree, pulled that way by the blows that killed him. The other sits more peacefully; a spiderweb, bending with beads of water, is slung from one open hand to the other. The farmer pulls a rag out from the top pocket in his overalls and holds it to his face. He lurches forward and drops his hand to the ground for support. A sharp pine needle pricks his palm, causing him to fall to his knees, and he holds the rag against his face with both hands. An orange bird suddenly floats down from around the tree and lands on the paper plate, puncturing the softness with its tiny claws. The bird steps around jerkily for footing then lifts off flying low towards the stream. The farmer is crying into the rag. A few metres to his right the purple flowers have overtaken the white ones with a new burst of growth. Several thumb-size bees hover among them, dropping and climbing noisily from flower to flower. The glistening bulge of a slug is attached to a spoon that lays crooked between two stones that are still wet in the shade of a softened log.

The farmer returns using the exact same route as the man who had driven his car through the field the day before. There are no tire tracks to follow, he merely follows the course suggested by the combined valleys. By the time he reaches his small home built against the hill where the barn stands, he is walking very slowly, swinging a pole at his side that he had seen leaning against a rock in the field. A dog runs to him from the entrance, shaking its long, sandy coat. It takes a snap at the pole and when it does bite down he releases his grip. The dog drops the pole, mimicking the farmer’s disinterest, and follows him closely. Its hind quarters are wagging so vigorously that it has to pull itself through the door. In a corner of the kitchen a chair sits beside a brown telephone that waits on a tall narrow table. The farmer sits in this chair and clucks his teeth, bringing the dog to him. The dog rests its head on his crotch, and it whines as the farmer drags a closed hand across the smooth hair between its ears. The farmer lifts his hand from the dog’s head and it barks sharply. He grabs its head, vigorously shaking the loose skin and saying, Yes. Yes. Yes. He rises from the chair and goes to the open kitchen door. Resting his knee against a small wooden stool, he scoops a yellow plastic cup into an open sack of dog food. When he puts the food into a dish by the refrigerator the dog stares at the empty cup in the farmer’s hand. It doesn’t eat from the dish until he has returned the cup to its hook in the entrance. The farmer returns to the chair beside the telephone.

The farmer lifts the receiver out of its cradle and returns it. He repeats the action several times before getting up and poking through a closet by the stove. After pouring himself a glass of whisky from a bottle he finds there, he again resumes his place by the phone: this time facing the centre of the kitchen. He draws in a deep breath to brace himself and expels it as he straightens his back, then downs the whisky in a single gulp. With a type of frown on his face he lifts the receiver again, this time dialling almost immediately. After completing the phone call, he makes his way down the hall to his small bedroom. He unbuttons his overalls and sits on the edge of the bed to remove his boots. When he is undressed down to an undershirt and red-and-white striped boxer shorts he pulls back the damp heavy blankets from under the pillows. He stretches under the coolness, drawing the blankets over his spotty shoulders. He folds his hand against his eyes and kicks the covers out from their tuck at the end of the bed. He is soon snoring loudly, which brings the dog walking softly into the room.

It does not rain again for two days, and this allows the stream to return to its edges, to work its way back up under the huge black tangle of roots and resume its trembling against the sand. The nearly fully purple bush and the yellow flowers are joined by a yellow tape that drops to the ground behind the tree. The bodies have been removed. The paper plate has disappeared; it has either disintegrated or been removed as well. A spoon is beneath the stones where it was trapped, and the rain is washing away a muddy tread that unifies these surfaces.

WINTER

In the waiting room of Dr. Mendez, a family doctor, there are eight people with only five and a half sets of eyebrows between them. Every one of those lost eyebrows has been claimed by the sidewalk. Many of his patients are prone to falling in a fashion so free of inhibition that they often neglect to protect themselves on the way down. And the way down is always fast and the stay there very long.

The clipped bottoms of chins and the tips of noses and patches of hair spottily represent the faces of these patients, who crowd the waiting room from dawn until well past nightfall. There are holes punched into the plaster walls. The receptionist sits behind a wire mesh window, with her hand resting beside a button which, when pressed, rattles the locked door open with electricity. Inside Dr. Mendez rocks in his chair feeling a drowsy comfort that the day will last one thousand hours.

Today he will cry, while treating his patients, as he has cried every day speaking with them, telling different versions of his flight from the hard Jamaican police. His patients, who are all drop-ins, will sit silently through visits, which sometimes take one or two hours. They all come for the same reasons, rarely medical in nature, and they all have a lot of time to kill. They mark this time watching the soft bubbles harden in the corners of the doctor’s mouth while he speaks. Then he will slide his hand across a pad writing slowly and sadly, remembering things and looking up to ask, Are you a Tuesday Boy or a Friday Boy? Above his desk a sheet of paper is held with orange tape. In capital letters it says:

WE NO LONGER LEND MONEY IN THIS OFFICE

and

TRANQUILLIZERS ARE NOT THE ONLY ANSWER.

Tuesday, Dr. Mendez.

Grief. The doctor buries his chin in the thick folds of his neck. Grief, my Tuesday Boy, makes us seem strange to ourselves. Do you see?

It is always easy to imagine what is on Dr. Mendez’s mind, because he always seems to speak it.

The emotions we are patching together this moment have nothing to do with the new one that is emerging. We will never realize the work that new emotions are doing, because they are made in amnesia and when they light up, we will have always possessed them. Like my patients — all out of work, some really out of their minds, you see — casualties, wanting me to conscript new emotions. Unemployed emotions, always there.

He stares into cupped hands and then tenderly turns them over, smiling sadly, watching as nothing falls from them. I imagine the magazines in the waiting room changing into baseball bats and chains. There are signs prohibiting these things popping up all over town this winter.

Grief, Tuesday Boy. You lose a parent, or maybe you lose an entire family. In a single day. The police rebuild your world for you in a single day, but this mighty wind, like a great broom, sweeps the legs of your father and the arms of your mother back into the yard. And you beat the dogs that chew on their limbs. Beating and beating yourself to exhaustion.

Mendez presses the eraser of his pencil into the cleft in his chin, and blinks back tears.

The dogs always come back, Tuesday Boy, even when the bodies are gone. Even when they know that you will beat them.

Mendez smiles and brings his pen down to his prescription pad.

Only this one day you will feed them.

He writes quickly, ignoring himself, then rolls the pen with his palm, back and forth across the pad.

Grief, Tuesday Boy. You think the Ontario policeman is a hard man? Some are. Hardness is everywhere.

Mendez lifts the pad up close to his face and squints at it; his tears now spill as he concentrates. His pupils are tiny and black in the sad milk that washes over them. Suddenly, he blinks his eyes clear.

Look at this bloody pad, Tuesday Boy!

He turns it briefly to me, but I see nothing extraordinary.

This bunny here. Look. Don’t you see it?

He flashes the pad at me again and I see the stylized depiction of a rabbit rendered in a single blue line.

This little bunny, chewing away at the lawn, hopping around in someone’s garden, is a logo. What an astounding thing! Why, in God’s name, has this pharmacy chosen a little bunny for a logo?

Dr. Mendez lifts his phone from the desk, weaves its cable around trays and jars, and places it in his lap. He reaches for the pad and tips it up against the phone, as if it were a lectern. He seems to be looking down at it from miles above.

Are we supposed to be happy little bunnies, nibbling calmly in our peaceful little patch? No, no, Tuesday Boy, I think this damned business doesn’t mean a thing. Just bloody cute. Bunny, bunny nibbling on heart pills. Bunny, bunny nibbling on Clinoril. No, Tuesday Boy, this bunny is merely chewing in the grass. What a silly thing.

Mendez dials the phone number under the swirled blue line denoting the rabbit, and then rocking backward, he tosses the pad across his desk.

Listen to me, I’m Dr. Mendez, here in Bewdley. I would like to call in a prescription for …

He cups his hand over the phone and prompts me for my name and then he repeats it very phonetically, as if it were an obscure disease.

But I would also like to inquire about your astonishing logo.

As he listens he pushes his hand down onto his head.

Logo. Logo. Here on your prescription pad. I am curious about this remarkable bunny here in the top right-hand corner.

His hand falls across his desk, knocking over a pencil holder, and he picks up a second pad. He runs a cyclone of ovals around the bunny with his pencil.

Yes, bunny. A bunny, a little bunny there. In light blue, just above your address.

Mendez drops the pad in front of him and lays his hand softly upon it.

You see what I mean, don’t you? Well, it’s so strange, you see, it’s a bloody bunny.

Mendez looks away from the pad and stares at a piece of yellowed tape that is curling at the edges, revealing a bright rectangle of white in the centre of the brownish wall. Mendez reaches over and presses the edges of the tape down.

Yes, yes. I’m sure that’s why you have the bunny there. I’m sure it all makes perfect sense. But I don’t really care, you understand me, I just want to order a few of these pads for myself. Yes. Well, three dozen.

Another piece of tape curls from the wall and a photocopied list of EMOTIONS ANONYMOUS meetings, dated the previous fall, swings to an angle and turns over.

Of course, with the bunny, yes.

It is January in Bewdley, which means the lake is frozen and the trees are heavy and black. Packs of wolves roam through the forests. At night their voices carry far through empty, frozen space. Just before dawn a snowplough divides Bewdley in half, leaving tall sharp rows of ice on the sidewalks of the main strip.

In a small residential area which hides lying north of Bewdley’s summertime centre, the homes are tucked irregularly into wooded lots of indeterminate size. They are made of identical orange and pale brick and though each house differs slightly from its neighbour, they all seem to share the same definition of ‘home.’ There are a few rebellious houses self-consciously defying this definition, and so they resemble fallen aircraft. Mendez lives in a small room on the third floor of an orange brick house. The top floor has been added to the structure and is shingled grey. His room juts out slightly at the back of the house against the branches of a tree, which appear to partly support it. Cauliflowers of fungus freeze in the sunlight along the windowsill and at least three ghosts haunt the house, though Mendez has never encountered them.

Dr. Mendez is seated at a table in the sunny room that hangs among the tree’s branches. He has, in front of him, prescription pads stacked in two rows. In one pale brown hand he holds an ampoule of clear liquid and resting under the other hand is a syringe. He rolls the syringe’s bright orange cap between his thumb and forefinger, turning it against his palm before releasing it, then he pinches the rounded narrow tip of the ampoule. He snaps the glass tip off allowing it to drop and roll to a rest. While one hand holds the opened ampoule carefully at its base the other deftly pops the cap of the syringe and rotates it so that two fingers lightly squeezing the plunger flanges can drop the exposed needle into the ampoule. Mendez seems to be watching a remote activity as he draws the fluid up the syringe. He flips the near empty ampoule away and having translated the charm of one object into another, he raises the point of the syringe and taps it rhythmically with the back of his fingers. He doesn’t pause long before sliding the needle into his arm above the inside of his elbow, flagging a tiny red propeller of blood back into the shaft, then steadily injecting the contents into his vein. Except for a short ready breath there is no visible evidence of the effects of the drug as he gathers the spent paraphernalia, rolls it back into its packaging, and drops it into a small basket beneath his desk.

The doctor sits shirtless in the sunlight. Across his round firm belly there is a diagonal spray of scars. They are white and thick like clenched teeth. In Jamaica, twelve years ago, four men had surprised him in his office late at night. He had refused to give them drugs and they slapped his torso with knives before dragging the safe from the wall. By the time they left the safe lay on its side, still secure, the handle and dial were wet with the doctor’s blood and its edges were frustrated with turning fingerprints. The doctor goes into his bedroom and removes one of five white shirts from the closet. On the back of the closet door hangs an oil painting, its frayed edges cut from a frame. It depicts a green and grey sea beneath a spotty yellow sky. In the upper right part of the sky, a deep blue sun sheds progressively lighter blue-green scales that interlock with the concentric movement in the yellow sky. Beneath the sun hundreds of tiny dark purple cups represent its reflection on the sea and in spite of this wrong colour it is light on water. Mendez continues dressing as he enters a tiny sitting room. He goes to a standing bureau and adjusts his tie in the coppery mirror, then he withdraws a bright yellow sheet from the top drawer. On it are printed gold and black alligators in rows across and along the page. Mendez curls one of the decals off and presses it onto a calendar under Wednesday.

In the waiting room of Mendez’s office a young man sits on the couch between two fist-sized scuffs on the wall. His newly dyed hair sits like a hat. It is the same colour as the electrical tape that tags down the corners of notices on the wall. When the receptionist calls his name, he rises, nearly stepping onto the coffee table, then he veers off walking in a direction that he is forced to suddenly change in order to reach the receptionist’s window. She is young, her hair is dyed a deep burgundy and her eyebrows are full and dense, nearly meeting. When she speaks to him the illusion of office disappears.

I think the doctor’s almost ready for you. He’s been with the same patient for over an hour, now. Maybe I should … no … listen why don’t you just go in and say that I must have thought he was free.

The tall man pulls himself anxiously below his height and looks at her helplessly. She ignores him for a few seconds, then abruptly flips her hands open around her ears.

OK, alright, he’ll see you now.

When he enters the doctor’s examining room, Mendez is, in fact, alone. The man stands for some time waiting for the doctor to notice him. Mendez does this with a solemn, musical turn of his hand. When the man sits, holding the chair at the front and squeezing his thighs together against his wrists, Mendez looks up, suddenly smiling.

"Someone is forgetting us, Wednesday Boy. If we can’t sleep, we do have the choice of staying awake and asking ourselves why this is so. Why can’t I sleep? I’m sitting here on the edge of my bed twisting my pillow like a child’s doll and why? Go to the kitchen. Sit down in the chair there. Put the light on and have a cigarette. And then ‘Oh my God!’ you say, ‘Good Heavens, I am deeply unhappy — the things I have done, what does the world think of me?’"

Mendez lifts a hole puncher off of his desk and squeezes it in his fist, presenting this to the man as evidence or an answer.

You see, Wednesday Boy, maybe then you take your bombers and go to sleep, but you will have found something out. What could have been discovered? Sleeping away, a crazy sleep. What could be discovered?

Mendez holds his hand up to stop the answer that isn’t forthcoming. These are not hypothetical questions. Mendez withdraws a comb from the breast pocket of his white coat. He elaborately dusts the air around his head, taking passes at the crown of his head, before gently drawing it through the thin white hairs that fly across his scalp. Suddenly, his shoulders fall, and he drops the comb on the desk, knocking a crescent of powdered skin across a blue pen drawing on his calendar. He appears on the brink of an apology, of a confession, when the drawing catches his attention.

You see this drawing, Wednesday Boy? I drew this here, last month or so. Do you like it?

The drawing depicts four men, each in his own canoe, sitting in the cove of a lake. The forested shore is heavily rendered in hatches and scribbling and the sun is a whorl of faint lines. The two-dimensional canoes tilt and swing awkwardly in the three-dimensional space of the landscape. Mendez closes an eye and tilts his head.

You see them, these hard men, they are quiet on this water. Maybe a bird is in the sky.

Mendez scrapes an ink blob from the tip of his pen near the sun.

We do not know who they are. I don’t think we do. And they don’t know who we are. I think they are in another century, Wednesday Boy, living for different things than we know about. I have drawn them here, Wednesday Boy, and I think that that will keep me from my sleep.

Mendez looks up with a nearly laughing smile.

And so, what will keep you from your sleep tonight?

The man realizes that he is being asked a question.

I am having problems sleeping.

The doctor’s eyes seem to dull as he opens his patient’s file.

What is it, Wednesday Boy? Is the neighbourhood so very loud? Is your wife prodding away at you to make love to her?

The patient makes no attempt to smile, rather he appears to be in pain. He twists his neck and lays his fist against his right side.

My back injury is acting up. I can hardly move. I can’t even lie down it hurts so bad.

The two men sit silently. The doctor watches while his patient slowly turns and stretches in his chair, becoming absorbed in the pain.

I see. I wonder … I have things written here. You like reading, you have been to college — I should call you College Boy — you have left Toronto because there are no jobs for you. Two of your people, close to you, have died since you left. There is so much. Why did things become so difficult for you?

The patient puts a hand to his face, letting his fingers drop from his nose to his lips. He looks up over the doctor’s head, his eyes nearly rolling, but they stop and fix on a vanishing point behind the wall.

Bombers and painkillers. I think the danger is that you want to blow your brains out. That is our problem. I like you, Wednesday Boy, I don’t want to hear about how you got yourself killed. I’d rather like to hear that you are reading good books and thinking about them, talking about ideas. Calling your mother to say that, yes, life is hard, but I’ve just spent the day with a lovely girl who paints. You think I am crazy, Wednesday Boy, but I have just imagined a better life for you. Think of that.

The patient hooks his hands over his knees and lets out a breath that fills his cheeks.

I am going to pray for you, my friend with a terrible back. I will ask Jesus to touch you with his fingers while you sleep. But in order to do that I have to get you to sleep first, don’t I? Mendez drops a prescription pad on his desk and he absently draws an eye on the bunny in the corner.

Twenty-five Placydil … and let’s see … these Percocet, take only as prescribed. No drinking. I assure you that tonight you will sleep. But next Wednesday we begin taking less of these.

This winter the snow is falling so heavily and so often that the region is having difficulty keeping the roads clear. Many residents have traded in their older model snowmobiles for newer, more powerful machines. These vehicles prowl the wilderness around Bewdley and are constantly bursting in and out of otherwise remote and silent corners of the forest. Dr. Mendez purchased a used snowmobile in mid December and he puts aside his Sundays for racing across fields of snow. His machine is a battered blue Yamaha, its cowl is scuffed and splintered and when he starts it up it becomes enshrouded in broiling grey smoke. He