The n-Body Problem

by Tony Burgess

  “Curtains!”

  Dixon steps aside, presenting me to an audience with his open hand.

  “Phresenting, the man who would not die!”

  The seats are full. All of Avening is here. Young and old. All the mothers and all the fathers and all the little children. And their bones are gnashing. Their faces have slipped. Their heads bob on strings. A man, whose naked body is entirely blackened, falls forward in the front row. A lump on his side breaks off. Y runs forward and props him back up. He places the shapeless mass, a baby, on his lap.

  A banner across the back wall: “WASTECORP—Things are looking up!”

  I can hear clanging sounds to my right. Metal in pans. A beep counting.

  “That’s right, man! Old Dix is a government dick!”

  Dixon steps out centre stage and faces his audience.

  “Welcome, everyone! Soon you’re all going on a trip but first we have a show. Something nice to send you off with!”

  Dixon turns to me. He has put lipstick on. It’s blood. His lame lower lip drools.

  “We get phaid pher body, phal. You folks just don’t die fast enough.”

  “Don’t kill me, Dixon. I’ll do anything you want. Make me suffer. I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to die.”

  Dixon stands erect and turns on his toe.

  “Folks, we have to move things along here. Phe-nder Mines should be moving in in a few hours. We gotta get you up above the clouds!”

  Someone is pulling me up. Doctor Anne. I don’t resist. I don’t want to be killed suddenly. Pender Mines. That’s ridiculous. Dixon can say whatever he wants. Do whatever he wants. You don’t need to makes sense to me, Dix. Don’t even try.

  “What you are aphout to witness, my friends, is a new innovation from the great minds at WasteCorph R and D. With the assistance of the lovely Doctor Anne, I intend to take you on a journey. Something for you to think about while the stars break your eyes and the sun dries your eyes.”

  I am guided to a gurney. Two tables are wheeled to my sides.

  “Today, we change what it means to be human!”

  There are silver spider nests on the tables. Complicated medical instruments. My arms are strapped in. I look up. Y is tightening. This would be the time to say something. To break through to him. To squeeze an emotion.

  Y is smiling. Y is happy. Y is old.

  I feel a tear leave my lower lid. Not because I have been betrayed by the boy I saved. Not because I love him. Not because I love anyone at all. Not because I am going to suffer now. Probably unimaginable torture. But because I’m pretty sure I’m going to die.

  Doctor Anne wipes the crook of my arm. Clinical habit. She inserts a needle. Something to keep me alive through this. Keep me alive. I look up into Doctor Anne’s face. She glances at me. Not a bad person. Not cruel. She listens to desperate pleas. I know she does. I know it.

  I plead.

  2

  bumps in the road.

  I have been unconscious. I can feel it. My hands and feet are prickling back to life. My eyes are stuck shut. I try to open them, but they won’t. I believe my eyes have been sewn shut. Maybe they have crusted shut? I even out my breathing. My heart is banging through my body. I will calmly take measure of this. I will find out more.

  I am alive.

  I can also feel movement. A light pull in my chest. A force. Gravity behind me. There is warmth on my face. I am being moved quickly. The sun above, the earth below.

  I am dead.

  I try to pull my lids apart. My hands are not moving. They hang beside me, they float. My legs move in fits. Did we know this? Did we know that we don’t die up here? That we feel it? That we know it? I am miles above the earth with billions of people. I need to stay calm. I need to not go mad. I breathe again. Easy, long breath. My heart begins to slow. I need to contain this. Contain myself. Take stock.

  I have minimal sensation. Some of it, like breathing, might be memory, phantom breath. I have to retreat from my body. Leave my limbs. I have to change my thinking. I have to change what it means to be here. I am thought now. This relaxes me further. I am not going to die. I am not going to live. I am going to picture being here. My eyes are sealed shut. I start to think about whether this is an advantage, then I abandon the thought. I have no advantage. I have no disadvantage. When I relax, my eyes open. The light ravishes me. Sun fills my face and erases me. I feel like I am soaring. I have been distilled down to a tiny intense thrill. Soon, the whiteness separates into shapes. A circle. The moon. This light is the moon. Another circle. I feel myself bounce. I am happy. Nothing can hurt me. Nothing can stop this. I am laughing.

  I am in a car. Y is driving. Dixon in the passenger seat. Ahead, a narrow hilly road. I bounce again. I turn and there is Doctor Anne’s face. She says something to Dixon. I can’t hear a thing. I can’t feel a thing. A reflection of the road flashes across me. I am behind glass. I am in a glass case in the back seat of a car hurtling down a country road. I’ll smash the glass. I push both my fists out but they don’t move. I try to kick.

  My body has been wrapped. I am bound in tightly pulled linen. In a glass case. I thrash and try to roll against the glass. Doctor Anne says something again. I try to figure out if my arms are behind me or bound to my chest. I can’t find them. I am much smaller. I am in a cocoon the size of log. I stop moving. They have removed my arms and legs and encased me.

  I am alive.

  underemployed.

  There are tubes hooked up to the base of the cabinet I inhabit. Doctor Anne controls if I am asleep or wake. Among other things. I am probably fed from down there. I void through something. Into something. I have just woken again and my lids are stuck together again. My eyes are not lubricating properly. The rest of me is run from below. My eyes, however, are being maintained by no one. I stop trying to open them. Last time they opened on their own. Had I cried? Was that it? I’m not sure if I can even manage crying right now. Where would I start?

  I am moving. A regular bounce. Someone is carrying me. I must be very small now. My head bobs on my neck. I’m being carried sideways. They wouldn’t kill me now, would they? I’m pretty elaborate. You don’t make elaborate things then destroy them. No. I am a trophy. I am turned upright. Then turned upside down. My eyes fly open. Y is holding me. Turn me right way around! Turn me! I can feel gurgling beneath me. Fluids are going in the wrong direction. A pair of hands land on the case. Doctor Anne. She turns me up.

  I can only hear faintly what’s going on outside. I can tell she isn’t happy. I remember those days. An orange t-shirt. Dixon’s hands. The pads on his fingers are crystal clear on the glass. They pull slightly as he takes my case. I can see people in the distance. Picnic tables. Trees. A band shell. Not Avening. Where are we? Dixon puts me down. I can see him frantically explaining something to Doctor Anne.

  Y has moved up onto the band shell and is setting up some kind of display. There is a long banner. WASTECORP ANNUAL PICNIC. I sense something close. The faces of two children close to the glass. A girl points, her finger presses. Dixon knocks her hand down. She looks up, big eyes and heavy lips. What am I supposed to be?

  I am lifted again and swept up onto the stage. I am sat on the display table. I watch Dixon step out centre stage. His arms rise and fall as he talks. He is very animated. A trophy? Maybe I’m an oracle. A holy relic. I can see the audience looking past Dixon to me. I lay the back of my head on the glass. My neck is sore. My neck reacts as if the rest of my body was active. The vestigial ghost of me. I wonder how far my spine goes down or if I’m sitting on a soft tube of organs. I can clench my stomach. She must have seen the scar there. Y might have told her how he saved my life in an abandoned car behind the Home Hardware. From a distance I can see how they both must take pride in me. I am something wonderful they share. I am what they did.

  I hear Dixon’s voice.

  “And phehold! The future of life on earth is Syndrome! It takes us all! And it takes us phiece by phiece! The nerves of the back are gr
ound to pulph by its own great column! The feet are withered and droph off! The victim of morning-onset diaphetes! A million sclerotic nerves biting the toes off like children’s teeth crack candy! The calves give in to desphair and phointlessness, phecoming fetid lunch for maggots! While cancer of the phone casts off all ligaments and muscle as the marrow drains clean as a straw dropping milk! The shoulders fall like phad apples! The arms! The hands! Who knows what sly new infirmity snatched them off! The kiln-fired liver! The immophile heart! Dead colon and sphleen! What can this worm in time ask for? What will we want? We can only ask!”

  The audience is all open mouths and silent. Children perched on shoulders. Dixon walks back to me and leans down. He unlatches the door to the case. He puts his ear to my mouth. I will tell them the truth. I go to speak but can only mumble. I have no tongue. They cut out my tongue. I cannot tell them anything. Dixon rises and covers his face. He staggers to the front of the stage. He speaks in a hushed intimate voice full of candour and gravity.

  “It has sphoken to me. Do you want to know what it said?”

  Heads nod.

  “Do you?”

  Several shout.

  “Do you want to know what your future is saying to you?”

  More shouts. Dixon raises a hand and the audience stops. Some of the children are brought down off shoulders and held.

  “It wants to be free.”

  Silence.

  “It wants to be free!”

  The audience erupts. It isn’t a cheer, really, more a chorus of shouts—anger and agreement and some dissent and keening. Dixon rushes back to me and violently swings my case in the air.

  “It is crying for you! Phehold the tears!”

  I am crying. Not for them. Though if there was more to me I might. I cry because I have just discovered that my tongue has been cut from my mouth.

  The audience is now spellbound. This got them. I look upward to heaven. I don’t know what I want. I want to be Holy. I want belief from them. I am not human.

  Dixon drops me back into place. I see Y reach the centre of the stage. I am sad when he speaks. I remember when he couldn’t.

  “Forms are down here to my left. We do have orbit charts and placements for a placement fee. Please line up!”

  The door to the case is closed and latched and I am returned to my muffled world. The smell of linen and liniment. The pumps and engines beneath and their hums and puffs. A black cloth is pulled over my case. In the darkness I can see a red dot blink, reflected in the glass.

  The next several days are spent like this. I am moved from time to time, but mostly I sit in darkness listening to the little machines attached below. I learn the new smell of my feces, feces which I will never see again. It smells like pencil shavings. Pencil shavings and vinegar. Occasionally I open my mouth and howl. It’s an upsetting sound. A walrus bark. I learn that I do have muscle. Across my back to the two points at the base of my neck. And down to the edges. I use them just to feel them. I tell myself I am going for walks and I flex them. I wish they hadn’t taken my tongue. That is the worst thing. I can no longer say if I am awake or dreaming and have decided they are one and the same.

  The audience. The preacher. The forms. The hood is pulled off and the event repeated. I do not cry anymore so now the doctor puts drops in my eyes before I am revealed. Each time it is less crisp, less real. I find myself sailing over their heads, wanting only to be returned to my case and my silence and my darkness.

  everyone i see is dead now.

  I am planning to escape. It will not be easy. I am a limbless, mute baby in a sealed vault. I can rock. I have been trying this, mostly as a comfort, but my back and stomach muscles are getting stronger. I could wait until I am hoisted up above their heads, with the door thrown open and then I could rock and tip forward and fall. Then what? Fall into someone’s arms. I cannot chose that person or what they will do. I cannot tell them what I want them to do. I can pray. I can pray that I land in the arms of a teen mom who lost her rape baby. She would hold me fast and flee. Take me away from town. To a river winding in a shallow valley. I would suck her breasts. I pray that the milk would make me grow. I would grow arms and legs. I have trouble picturing them though. A nightmare always intrudes. The arms and legs are small bones hanging lose like plastic on a dime store Halloween doll. My tongue inflates and crushes me. An immense scarred manatee attached to the roof of my mouth. No. It’s impossible. If I managed to fall out of this case the crowd would jump back and I’d land in the dirt. My little machines smashed. I would die. I cannot die.

  Some of the towns I don’t recognize. We are moving south-eastward I think. I recognize Beeton. Beeton is mad. They press against the stage with their arms straight up. They’re in holy ecstasy. That’s when I realized I truly am a divine relic. I am a piece of cross. A Saint’s tibia. You see? You see us now, Oh Lord? I am pure. No hands to reach out and strike or steal or grope. No legs to run on, to escape justice, to stomp out with. No penis to cram into faces and mouths. No tongue to lie with. I am a singular message. I am here. That is all, Lord. I am here.

  Beeton is frightening. These people were waiting for us. Fathers and mothers stepping on their children just to touch the glass of my case. Sick old women draped across the front of the stage like fish dying on a riverbank. We are in the centre of Main Street here. Not in some parking lot, or remote park tucked away. We are now a popular travelling roadshow. Stacks of flyers in shoulder bags. Traffic cops swinging their arms. I spot the mayor on the sidewalk. He has his heavy red sash on. He looks terrified. Aware and sane. There are some, frantic moms pulling their children back. The majority, however, reach for me across the stage. Four teenage girls rush the stage and throw babies over heads. The babies, likely rape babies, are wrapped in bloody blankets. One tumbles out. No arms or legs. No limbs because the limbs have been cut off. They are dead. The teen moms flee amid cheers. Dixon shakes his fists above the fray, pleading and crying to the grey sky. I notice Y on a chair at the edge of the stage. He has a bandage wrapped around his thigh. He must have tried to cut his leg off.

  People want to be me.

  Later that night we begin the mass launch. This time the cable is thrown down the middle of main street. I watch as the cable is pulled taut down two blocks of maple-lined street. Police hold people back on the sidewalks while connections are made and tested.

  I hear the anabolic shriek of table saws and clattering glottis of chainsaws. Stations are set up in storefronts for people who wish to be dismembered before they go. The first few are the most zealous and they endure the blades with eyes cast upward in frozen joy. Freshly removed arms and legs are passed across a sea of risen hands. Genitals are flung up into trees and telephone wires. The reduced torsos rolled to the cable where they bleed out in seconds. Soon blood has caught everyone. Shirtless men and women pat themselves with sticky red palms. Faces plastered with rich dark hair. Bright ghost shapes on windows. The next wave of dismemberment is not as deliberate. This wave is changing its mind having seen the first. This wave has to be pushed to the saws, held down by many hands. Some wiggle free, made slippery by their own blood. They spring howling though the crowd. Some have one arm and a shoulder spraying mist across the crowd. Some have only deep cuts and they bounce from brick walls like animated scarecrows. Order dies. The crowd no longer looks to the stage. There are too many screaming machines. Too much blood and running corpses. Whirling blenders that make their way into the crowd. They are seeking their own completion now. Dixon turns back to me. He gestures to Y. Time to go. Throw the damn switch and let’s move on.

  The cable explodes down the middle of the street and hundreds of people seize up at once. Others leap on and are crunched into balls by the voltage. Blood pools blacken and are lit with fury. Several heavy men move in, driving chainsaws through backs and necks until the current finds them and they become still, still like memorial statues. Dixon lifts me and I am placed in the truck. The crowd that is still able to move moves on us. I watc
h the faces of people throwing themselves onto the windows. These are not the faithful anymore. These ones have been shattered, they have awoken angry and afraid. They are yelling at me. Pounding the window. We are running away form what we started. They know it.

  Y shoots those hanging off the drivers’ side. Several bullets pierce glass and slip into upholstery. Dixon uses a hammer to cave in the skulls of people in his way. The truck starts and pulls forward, but the hands of the frenzy hold us back. The tires spin and burn in place. Dixon turns to me and signals the doctor to hold my case. He throws it in reverse and the wheels bounce across bodies. When he throws it into drive, we fishtail on the guts and muscle and bone. The tires burn through the skin and grab the road. We shoot forward and plough through those ahead. I hear Dixon call out like a cowboy. We are under the heavy sopping skirts of flesh blood. Torn arms and butterflied faces. The contents of stomachs, the undersides of lost heads. Dixon reverses again, this time opening a patch of sky. There is a live cable on the ground somewhere. The rubber tires protects us but the blood could conduct it. We break through the body knots and are free. Dixon guns it and we hit a light standard. The truck turns and the standard falls, pulling people down and folding them. I see flames. The crowd has ignited and the living are like freshly lit matches, their hair bright orange and yellow. The truck is heading out from the centre of town. I can no longer see what is happening behind us.

  I used to have the ability to be moved by things like this. Horrified. I wonder if my emotion might have been in my arms all along, my legs, my testicles. Gone. All I care about is getting away in time. When you can’t move on your own anymore there is no such thing as a place to stay.

  The windshield wipers are stirring up a pink foam. We have to pull over. We are east of Beeton on the 8th Line. Y is taking water in a pail from the ditch and throwing it onto the car. Dixon has walked down the road. The doctor sits beside me, her head turned. I want to look back. Is the town a fireball? Are they running up the road with their heads lit up? Y gets back in the driver’s seat and sits. Dixon returns. He reaches back and flips open the front of my case.