Pontypool Changes Everything полностью

It’s all they can do to remain at their desks and not come around and kiss you. You lift your cast and wiggle your fingers. They return the wave, nodding to your cast. It hangs now from a rear-view mirror. You include everything in the enthusiasm that you feel.

You have trouble finding more people to say goodbye to, and as the afternoon tips toward the end of office hours your Valium stay is starting to come loose. Buildings close in, much like you’d imagine, and you start to react fearfully to the people around you.

Soon you’re in a small parking lot between two cars fighting with two guys. They seem to think the key to the struggle is to pin your elbows together. You remember clearly piping in a voice to throw them off: A calmer head prevails, and, sirs, it is the same head that bites you.

You say in a universally appealing voice: “I can see a straitjacket working rather well in this type of situation.”

It is the first clear sentence that you’ve spoken aloud in weeks. One of the men raises his hand and grunts. He hates you. You grunt back. You’re not saying goodbye to these fuckers. As far as these things go, you’ll just stick to formula and soon you’ll be unconscious. Put there either by the blows they deliver or by violently ducking from hands that reach down to help you.

The next day you are a psychiatric patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital. They start you almost immediately on a diet of Lithium, Amitriptiline and Ativan, with a methadone taper. Fine, you think. You know exactly how long it will be before these drugs change your circuitry. Fine. A long way off. You spend the day sitting on the brand new couch in a tiny smoking room. Floating across the carpet at your feet, like an immense cat, is H/ellen.

H/ellen is about sixty, with long grey hair, and she is pulling at the hem of a light linen smock that is too short. She lies on her side, and you think she must weigh about three hundred pounds. She has the expression of an eight year old in trouble. Around her swollen hand on the carpet lie cigarette spokes. Twelve of them, browned at the tips, but unsmoked, they fan out from her splayed fingers.

“Gotta smoke?”

You flip H/ellen a cigarette. In ten minutes you flip her another, this time watching what she does with it. She puts it in her mouth and reaches down to a pack of matches folded into her sleeve. The heads of the matches are bent up like a fleeing mob and she twists off a stick to strike it. She manages this, rolling onto her back, and she takes the flare before it becomes orange and extinguishes it in the tip of the cigarette. She rolls back onto her side and smiles at you brattishly and asks for another cigarette. You give it to her. You think she confuses lighting cigarettes with putting them out. You think that’s it. You lay your pack open on the floor beside her, and she leaves it alone. Instead, she asks you for a cigarette every five minutes, without taking one. Soon she lies on her belly, drawing her hem midway up her back, rocking the giant white cheeks of her ass in the sun. She looks up at you, flirting and smiling. You return her looks and nudge the pack with your toe, closer to her. She laughs. You’ve surprised her somehow.

And then she says: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

“What is that?”

H/ellen knocks a cigarette out of the pack.

“Walt Whitman, part-time carpenter.”

You sit up on the edge of the couch, looking down at her face. You don’t know what else to ask. She looks up and licks the air between you.

“Ahhh. There you are. I’ve been looking for you, young man.”

A doctor is standing at H/ellen’s feet.

“Pull down your dress H/ellen. Do you think we all want to see you?”

The doctor pats you on the shoulder and stretches an arm leading to his office down the hall. You follow. As you approach his office you can tell that something is making him uncomfortable. Something is bothering him. You sit in his office and he flips open a file. You can tell he’s not reading it.

“So, so, so.” How twitchy this man is. You see a lot of doctors and you’ve begun to wonder: What on earth do they have in common?

“So, so, so.” He’s trying to say something, but he doesn’t know how. “You’re a painter, huh?”

You milk the painter angle whenever you can, it seems to satisfy something about you.

“Yes.”

“OK, you’re gonna think this is a little odd, but I want your professional opinion on something.”

You squint to picture yourself at an easel, in a paintsmeared smock, with one of those wood things hanging from your thumb. Art history: Cézanne, Polenc, and… and… Walt Whitman. You imagine lifting the back of your smock, flashing your ass at H/ellen, who is your model.

“Sure doc, anything. Shoot.”

“Yeah, so I bought this painting, that one over there.”