The n-Body Problem (10 page)

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 ground 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.

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 watch 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 8
^th
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.

“Can we get him out of there easy?”

The doctor reaches in and plays with the hook-up below. She nods.

“Yes. Why?”

Dixon rubs his lips hard. They must be numb. He has no feeling in his mouth. That’s the impediment.

“We’re going to change some things. No more phosters. Too much hype. I don’t want things haphening we can’t control. Who phrought the saws? Is that on any of the phosters? How did all this shit haphen?”

Y sighs. The doctor fiddles with my bottom.

“The new rule is we keep things calm. I got an idea.”

Dixon looks into my face. A look of surprise.

“Ha! How’s it going, phal? I almost forgot that was you in there. Listen uph. I want to try something. Next time, we phring the Oracle out and we phass it around.”

Y’s head is deep in his hands, elbows on the lower scoop of the wheel. There are white strands of hair bending up from the crown. He is several ages as far I can tell.

“It’ll calm them. Give them something to be careful with. I want an orderly burn. We made no fucking money in Pheeton and we might even get phulled in.”

Y starts the truck. Y knows why Beeton failed.

“Beeton was crazy before they met us. Pond Head’ll be better. Smaller. More churches.”

Dixon slaps Y on the shoulder.

“That’s right, son. Phond Head. But not too soon. Let’s phe missed for a while. Let ’em wonder if we’re real for a while.”

We don’t turn south to Bond Head. We head up towards the 9
^th
. We’re looking for trees or a house. I’m surprised to see cars on the road. Not many, but some. They look normal, timeless. Some lone drivers. Male mostly. One car full of a family. I try to read faces but they blow past too quickly. Cars and trucks at farmhouses. Cattle. It’s as if nothing happened. Could be the way this part of the country lives. Nothing is supposed to happen here. You can see too far. A small fishing boat for sale. The trailer tires flat. The posted price on swollen cardboard. If terrible things were approaching they would be seen hours before they arrived.

The truck slows and we pull up a dirt driveway. We lurch along its length and stop under a willow beside a massive red brick farmhouse. We sit in silence. The house is still. Thin pale leaves drift down and attach to blood clots under the wipers. Dixon shoves Y’s shoulder. Y shoots a look then opens the door. He walks cautiously around the front of the house. Dixon rolls his window down.

“Go knock.”

Y is tense. He takes the steps, counting.

“Knock!”

Y knocks and waits. Again.

“Ophen the door! Yell for ’em.”

Y doesn’t look back. He slowly draws the screen open, then the inner door. We hear his voice but not what he is saying. Y steps back out and waves. Clear.

“Okay. Well. This is a nice place.”

Dixon isn’t getting out just yet.

“Maybe we should retire here.”

A Rottweiler, moving like a barrel down a sluice, bursts through a hole in the backyard fence. It doesn’t bark until it sees Y, then it makes a killing noise. Y stops in mid-step.

“You gotta kill that!”

“Help!”

Y runs for the truck. The door locks, clunk.

“Kill the damn dog!”

“What?”

Y reaches the car with the dog. It springs up and grabs Y by the jaw, dragging him down.

Dixon roots through the glove box and finds a road flare. He opens the driver’s window and drops it.

“Shove this down its throat!”

Dixon rolls the window back up and waits. We hear the intense hiss of the flare igniting and then the dog cry out. Dixon waits, then rolls down the window.

“You there?”

The dog appears around the front of the truck. It doesn’t appear to be wounded but it ain’t a killer no more either. Not for now. It slinks back through the torn fence.

Dixon opens the door.

“Okay. Okay. Good job. I’m sorry. We got a doctor.”

The farmhouse smells of cows. The floors curve and the walls bow. Discoloured shapes on the ceiling form a map of the world. If you stare long enough you can see places you want to go. The doctor takes Y upstairs. He’s going to be okay. Some punctures on his scalp. A burn up his arm from the flare.

Dixon sets me up on the table as he goes through a pail he found inside the front door.

“This is the house of Phauline Hartenpherger. Lived alone. Oh. Wait. No. One kid at least. Goes to, went to, Byng Elementary school. This interest you at all?”

I say nothing. I pretend not to notice. I am still a prisoner.

Dixon opens, reads, and drops papers to the floor.

“Child support. Good for you, Pheter Harten-pherger. I got married, you know.”

Dixon is sharing. He’s proud.

“Yes, sir. After Indonesia. Her name was Phie. Like a phizza. We lived in Meaford. I had a daughter, too. Her name was Lo.”

Dixon is reading a phone bill. I wonder if you can see changes in a phone bill. Patterns. Times. Frequency of calls to the same number. Did the Hartenbergers make plans, then leave? Did they flee to the city? Did they hang themselves? Maybe they’re out back. Cold black bones on the clothesline.

“You wanna know what haphened to them? Got caught in the first raphe wave. Died.”

Dixon drops the phone bill. He straightens the pages and returns them to the envelope.

“I dropphed ’em in a well.”

Dixon reads signs on the wall. Happy Home. Live. Love. Laugh.

“You know what I love to do? Hmmm? I love a pheaceful launch. I like to sphend time with them phefore they go. Get a little carried away, sure, phut . . .”

Dixon thinks he’s different now. He wants to have a different past. If I was to mention that he has worn dead children he would think me vulgar. You don’t know anything, he’d say. Dixon wants to believe that he held out as long as he could. That if he’s a hero he’s only doing what anyone would do. And if he’s evil, it’s only the role he is forced to play. I expect him to cry. The doctor comes in and goes to the sink.

“Hi.”

Dixon is being ridiculous in this setting. The doctor turns, surprised.

“There’s beds upstairs. Lots of food in the cellar. Preserves. Tins. Some household medicines. Some antibiotics.”

“What’s Y doin’?”