The n-Body Problem Page 2

  Not much eye contact here. Fit-looking elder lining the pans of meat on a table. Another, older man with a stoop dishes out gravy with a ladle. The boys look anxious to get away. Not mine. He never leaves my side. The man I’m looking for will have found his son like I did. He’ll fit in the way I am. He knows fathers and sons are vulnerable, and these days anyway, likely to hold the family money. He also likes churches because he fancies himself a minister. He is a mechanism of God. He’ll point out the obvious: the living are the suffering, the sinners. We have been left behind and above us, bathed in light and weightless, are the free. He will instruct them how to die and then get their signatures on certain documents. Then they will die and he will move on to another town. Steal another boy. Drift down into another potluck dinner for men. Combine their despair and emptiness like elements of a homemade bomb.

  The fit elder sits across from me. He pokes the grey mass on his plate.

  “Lotsa meat. No potatoes.”

  The elder looks at my boy.

  “We know he’s not your son.”

  I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Well, you see—”

  “It’s ok. He’s better off. That’s all we need to know. My name’s Russel.”

  Russel lays his hand, palm up, on the table. I’m not to shake it. I look at it then quickly brush my fingers across his.

  “I’m looking for somebody, Russel.”

  “I know. He was here. We knew what he was about. No time for that here.”

  “Good for you.”

  “We used to do mission work. Irrigation systems. Help develop farmland in places like Ghana, West Africa. Them folks need our help.”

  Russel bows his head. Drops the hand to his lap.

  “Now. Well. Now. We’re just trying to remind our own to eat.”

  “Did he stay or move on?”

  “Who? Oh, him. I think he’s still in town. Going after teenagers. It’s evil what these guys do. I guess the best lack all conviction.”

  I can’t eat the food. It’d be a concern but I think it’s just bad. Anorexia’s a swamp of problems. You gotta carry around IV bags and shit.

  “What he look like?”

  Russel smiles when the boy takes a mouthful of the stiff white beef.

  “Oh. Nothing remarkable about him. He had a boy, like you. Let’s see. Thin fella. Sides of his head shaved.”

  “You notice anything about his hands?”

  “Yes. That’s right. The last digit on his small finger was gone. Hadda big yellow callous at the tip.”

  Some cells feel like they might be cracking open beside my spine. Ice water under my shoulder blade. I have to make a quick choice. Is it a tumour? No. Too unexpected. What then? The sensation is so vivid it’s as if it’s happening before my eyes. An injection of ice. Something has broken open. MS?

  “You okay?”

  The ice turns to grass fire. A surface fire. I adjust my shoulder slightly and feel a sewing machine sweep down my back.

  Shingles. That’s fuckin’ hilarious. It even possible I got this honestly? Varicella zoster virus—chicken pox, sleeping in nerve ending by my spine, suddenly wakes up and stakes blisters on my flesh. Or. Or. What? Shingles weren’t even on the radar.

  “You okay? You’re sweating.”

  I nod, sure. To prove this I fork some food to my mouth. A large droplet swings from my nose and hits the food. I can’t even chew. My mouth retreats around the food. My tongue furls to the back. My teeth jump apart. The lump feels electrified. Time to go.

  The boy sticks close as we climb up the church basement steps. Dark now. I have to take care of things. I drop the food from my mouth and spit. The flame in my spine trips again and I flinch my way to Main Street.

  Trying to remember which side of the street I got the boy from. Going to return him before things get too crazy. I peer in the car. The smell of shit sticks to the window. Can’t tell if Mom’s expired or just catatonic. Anyhow. Family reunion. I pull a twenty out and stuff it in the boy’s pants. Open the door. What hits us isn’t an odour; it’s a force. The woman’s dead. Her lower half has dissolved. I shut the door, and watch a whirl of coloured air warp the sidewalk.

  I don’t look at the boy. Sometimes doing no wrong means doing no right. I open the rear door, hoping the seat is dry. I gesture to the boy. You’re home, buddy. Thanks for hanging out.

  He looks at me, then extends his hand. I shake it. He climbs into the back seat and I slam the door.

  He knows I helped. A meal. Shower. New clothes. I do him one last favour.

  His mother is moving. She won’t hurt him, but she’s not gonna stop moving either. She’s dead. She’ll eventually shimmy to the floor and agitate all the poison. I hold my breath and open the driver door. Grab her by the coat and pull. She hits the road like a bad pumpkin. Then I swing her to the sidewalk. As much of her as holds together. There must be roadside pickup but I don’t know the day. Not perfectly legal what I’m doing.

  I take three long strides before I breathe. The sugary rot punches my gut. Too much sick to fight off. At least the shingles are buried by this.

  Heading back to make a plan. There may be time to catch the Youth Drop-in tonight. I’m about to cross the street but I stop. Back to the car.

  Can’t leave the fuckin’ kid like that.

  he has brought the house down.

  The guy with the sides of his head shaved. Mushroom cap on his little finger. That guy. You see, this racket is about going into communities, taking a few key people aside and talking them into killing themselves. The more marks you got the bigger the pile of gold they’re gonna leave behind. And it’s surprisingly easy to do. There just aren’t that many people left who actually wanna be here and if the Seller can lull you a bit with the idea of sunbathing weightlessly in space, with the world rolling below, then you happily go. Sometimes the Seller convinces you that he’ll go too. He doesn’t though. He stays back and drains your dough, then moves on.

  I know the Seller with the sides of his head shaved. That’s Glenn Dixon. He’s a top Seller. He once got a whole town—8,500 people—to lie down and die. Glenn and I go way back.

  The boy and I keep up Main. It’s about six o’clock. The Christian Drop-in opens at seven o’clock. I figure we’ll sit in the parkette and watch folks for an hour. The boy is steady, calm. We sit on a bench by a fountain. I open some pills and gag a bit to get them down. The boy stares ahead. He’s a remora. I’m a shark.

  Bright fence line across my vision. Top left half is pinball. Like a layer of hallucination pulled itself between me and the savage world. A slicing pain around the left ear. I can feel that things I’m going to think about this won’t add up. I have to affirm this temporarily. There are banana-coloured skies. There are crying leaves. There is a road that goes through puberty. Hot red teeth. Hallucinated light drawing shadows. That’s it. That’s what I affirm. The things that are not here are having a measurable effect on the things that are. If I look down, then eggs will fall from nests, pollen will bounce like flour on the lawn. Stroke. I don’t know much. Strokes do damage. I press in and try to hold on. The pain pushes down. I can’t swallow. There is one line, jagged and falling like a graph, a charted downturn. It’s black with a red ghost line. This is the dominant. It denies contiguity. The world above it is charged with pain and light. It is a stylus. Below the world is cold. Pain free. I am not in this half. I have to be. A couple. No faces. Long legs walk at an angle and turn. They can’t walk to a point. Not this point. Boot is a shadow club. I see the fine blue dots. Artefacts of her long coat. I need a place to store. I need a notebook. There is a finite number. She is an age. She is an entire morning. That. That is where I am not. That is where I am be. Raise my head quickly. Do the thing that things don’t expect. You make them what they are. The effect is disastrously close to being permanent. I can’t imagine and I feel sick. I throw up at my feet. The pain scoops my forehead. I watch the long line of yellow spin to the ground. My lip to a cra
ck in stone. This could be the out. Stones. Small and unlike one another. They have come from places, moved here on the bottom of impressionable boots. Grains. Wind born from the gutter. A purple plastic dulled by sun and winter. Part of a bubble-blowing ring. It is enough. It is enough. I count the rows of dimples in stone anyway. I note flaws. I mark variations—depth, colour. One dimple is a wound. White in the centre. A ring of inflammation. I close my eyes and pray for some approximation, something independent, something less accurate. Fuck me. How are regular people supposed to handle this? It’s hopeless. We need to be able to guess, for fuck’s sake.

  I have sat quietly for half an hour. The boy too. He was patient while I suffered. Now I am sitting upright. I have good breathing. The pain is all old. Echo. I am less worried about formulating. Less obsessed. I have two things in my vision that I’ll have to accept. One is a red and purple egg just off centre. The other is a thick line across the bottom. If I look up, the line widens. It looks like a face. Talking. If I look down, it disappears. Not gonna kill me. It’s good to have reminders. Like an oil light on the dash. I see you but I can drive. Big road ahead. The boy is calm. His boy scout uniform looks ridiculous. I get up and he follows.

  Short round Indian man in Stedmans. Behind him a rainbow of long shoehorns. Two feet long. He smiles and wheezes. Did you know that there are things about emphysema that are pleasurable? It’s true. Your lungs can feel soft. Your body’s gratitude for small oxygen is thrilling. You can feel great. I ask about kids clothes. He waves to a rack of things by the ties.

  The kid is thin. I grab a t-shirt. Pale blue. Wolf. Nah.

  “Pick something.”

  The kid looks up. He warily brushes the clothes. Performing, at first, self-conscious, then he makes a choice. I admire this. See who sees you. Then get what you want. He picks a plain brown t-shirt and some jeans. No socks, no underwear. The runners he has on are fine. He strips in the middle of the store and tosses the boy scout shit onto a table of candles. I catch the clerk watching us in the security mirror. Whatever, man. You look like a fuckin’ duck.

  The Youth Drop-in has been merged with an AA meeting in the back of an auto body shop. Teenagers and coffee-sipping drunks mix outside. In the past this would be a scene of terrible rape and probably beating. Maybe even death. Now, its all little cheese fingers and cigarette smoke stuck to faces. I wish the kid would talk. He has not spoken once.

  I get through the small group and enter the building. It’s a lunchroom for the employees. Chairs in a circle. Some pastries on a glass plate. I have to look down for a second to see a woman with long grey hair and a guitar. I gasp. The face opens up along that line again. That’s going to bother me in time.

  “Hi there. I’m Bob.”

  Not my name. The woman looks up, her face behind long grey hair.

  “Well, hi, Bob. I’m Ashley.”

  We both look at the boy for a moment, then look away.

  “You’re welcome here.”

  There are slogans on the walls. A picture of Jesus.

  “Really. You are.”

  I can’t look down. The talking face is distracting. Like a TV. I want to hear what’s being said on it.

  “Good. Thank you.”

  Still can’t look. Makes it harder. I sit. There. The egg settles above the line. Fuckin’ stroke.

  “Can I ask you a question, Ashley?”

  Ashley bangs a thumb softly on a string.

  “Shoot.”

  “You know pretty much everybody who comes out to this?”

  Ashley frowns deeply and thinks.

  “The regulars. Yeah. Why? You looking for someone?”

  I lean forward, elbows to knees. Ashley smiles at the kid.

  “I am, yes. He’s a thin guy. Gotta funny haircut.”

  Ashley gives me a hard look.

  “That’s weird. Why would you be looking for him?”

  “You’ve seen him? You know him?”

  Ashley appears to think again. A performance. Neurotic. She pretends to feel things. Acts like she knows.

  “Nope. And I know everybody who comes to these meetings. Nobody new. Nobody different.”

  That’s not what you said at first. Not precisely.

  There’s hollering outside. Ashley looks at me. She’s still pretending to think about the guy I’m looking for. She thinks, then shakes her head no. I don’t like the hollering outside. Neither does the kid. He’s turned in his chair. It’s 6:45 p.m. The door opens. A teenage girl. She is dramatic. Old Fashioned.

  “Chris is on the ground.”

  I stand outside the circle around Chris. He is having a seizure. It’s raining. Warm rain. The kids are hugging each other and weeping. The drama teen is down beside Chris.

  “No, Chris. No! You can’t die! You can’t! I’ll never find you!”

  Chris stops seizing. His hair is soaked. His face the colour of shrimp. He’s sick alright. He’s burning. I can see blood surfacing on his finger tips. He coughs up bright blood. One of his eyes slips below the socket. Thick fluids fill the space. This is viral. Virus is rare. A perfect storm. The receptors have to take territory in the stem cells. Your body has to make the virus. Give it life. Frankenstein. He coughs again and a mist of blood covers his forehead.

  Since I’m not certain if these Frankensteins are physically present and therefore contagious, I push the boy back. I don’t need to be here.

  The boy and I slip away. The girl falls on Chris, wailing. We hear a muffled plumph noise then a scream. Some part of his body has just released contents on her.

  at the back, the front.

  Twenty years ago. That’s when people stopped dying properly. They were dead inasmuch as they stopped being people. But they were alive because they never ceased to move. They didn’t walk. They didn’t do things. They just moved. A strange gentle agitation. Like Parkinson’s disease that kept on post-mortem.

  At first, we were terrified of them. We thought they would kill us. I don’t know why. We thought that the only reason the dead aren’t dead is because they wanted to kill us. So, we waged war on them. Shooting them and setting them on fire. We ran from them. We quarantined people in stadiums. We believed that terrible violent things were happening. It was often repeated on the news—the dead were eating us. In time their numbers grew. The dead were forming enormous masses. Twitching masses. All across the world. In time, economies began to collapse. Wars ended quietly. Leaders slipped away. We didn’t totally cave in. Some took hold of the structures, the culture, the daily life and they looked past, believing this was a solvable problem. They noticed, and soon we all did, that the dead were not hurting us. They were harmless.

  It took a long time for this fact to spread into the population. Some never bought it and committed horrible acts of hate on the dead. Some destroyed the dead for sport. Some kept parts in collections. Some wore moving fingers on chains. Still do. There’s a complicated, deviant culture pretty much everywhere these days.

  When some calm returned, when a majority was finally convinced that the dead meant no harm—in fact, meant nothing—then solutions became possible. This was a waste disposal problem. The dead numbered in the many hundreds of millions. And they made up mountains of bodies. Like water droplets running into each other to create flowing water. They didn’t mean to hurt us, but they threatened life in other ways. They became immovable. We didn’t know it at first but their biggest threat was invisible: we were now, all of us, thinking about them and thinking about them all the time.

  Governments, or at least what was left of them, turned to the private sector for tenders. Dispose of these things in an efficient and reasonable way. Keep costs down. Make it sustainable. Many proposals became popular. At one time, enormous cremating ovens were erected in Africa. They had incredible capacity. They recorded over a hundred thousand cremations a day. It was impressive. Iron ovens the size of cruise liners. Clean white smoke woven in the clouds. Still, weightless ash flowing on the wind into desert lands.

&nb
sp; It was the pictures that killed it though. Bulldozed bodies piled in the ovens. The filthy heat and fire. It was, to many, a ghost. The holocaust. The iron cross and the metal letters. There were others who saw the bodies burn and believed we were constructing hell. We were Satan’s architects and builders. Others, sentimental ones, just couldn’t bear the thought of an uncle or sister twitching in the dark centres of these body balls, then being burned.

  The African ovens were abandoned. There was a flood of proposals. Weight them down at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. This one failed in trials. The bodies simply found ways to surface. A clip of a trawler cutting through a sea of moving flesh and faces as far as the eye could see was too much. Landfill projects were tried, but with similar results. Thousands of moving beings beneath a landscape will find a way to break the surface. They poured down from hills and parks. Science tried to still them. To make them stop. But even this was too offensive once we saw their work. Vivisection and freezing and hammering and encasing and draining and filling with hard glues. Nothing stopped our nightmares. We were starting to feel this new creature was lying within us.

  The answer that we finally accepted went like this. Waste Management Corp. (WasteCorp) constructed space shuttles with immense crates on their backs. These ships headed into our upper atmosphere and released the millions, setting them into orbit around the earth. WasteCorp, having learned a few things, knew it had to calm us, had to provide new rituals, had to give us the right pictures. Sunbaked loved ones. Star-dappled children. Not gathering in mounds like mad insects, but rather distributed evenly in infinite space. Great care was taken with both word and image. In fact, it was pitched as a vast improvement over being eaten by worms in the cold, indifferent earth. This was a room with a view. This was not death, but like what it was, a final place to slow down and be surrounded by wonder.

  And so we sent them. By the millions. The only images we saw were beautiful. People leaving the ship easily, then drifting like a soft astral landscape. There was no question: it was the perfect place to rest. WasteCorp said that the dead were gently refusing the grave, and waiting for us to move them to the sky. If you could afford it you could even have a trackable loved one. You couldn’t see them with the naked eye, but a chart was issued to you and you could know roughly what part of the sky they moved. Every day and night.