Tony Burgess - The n-Body Problem

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.

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.

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!”