Tony Burgess - The n-Body Problem

“Did you get it? Did you get it?”

I lay still. A face peers cautiously under the couch. I watch through half-closed eyes.

“I think so.”

Holly is crying.

I wiggle along the groove and draw myself to the wall behind the stove. Too hot. Too hot.

“Well, let’s make sure. Pull the couch back. I want this thing in the fuckin’ fire.”

I roll quickly under the stove. My hair crackles and singes. I come out into the middle of the room. Holly and the boys are busy stabbing the couch with the poker. I move by, drawing my back end up under and pushing forward. I reach the kitchen and spot the door under the sink. It’s open. I wiggle through and push the bottles of ancient cleaning liquids aside. They’ll see me here. I manage to cram myself into a space between the wall and a box. I stop and listen.

“It’s gone!”

“Gone!”

The shrieking begins again.

“Look for it! Find it!”

Things are crashing around in the room. Furniture overturned. Cushions tossed into corners.

“It’s not in here!”

“Fuck! Fuck!”

“What do we do?”

“Keep looking!”

“Check the bedroom! Check the kitchen!”

“Hurry! I’m not stayin’ in here with that thing!”

They ransack rooms. I push myself hard into the corner, trying to compact my bundled body. I put my face into a spider web. A nest. A thin light cuts in through a crack and I see hundreds of red dots fan across the shroud of silk. I blow into it and the web’s upper canopy drifts across my face. The baby spiders trek on my skin. It feels as if my skin is hallucinating. I blow and snort frantically. They have heard me. I am found. Something stabs into my side and I squawk. I spring from the cupboard. I am going to be wild. I am going to scare them to death. I shoot, shrieking into a boy’s ankle and bite so completely that my teeth stop deep in bone. Then I twist like a corkscrew. He yells but I am louder. A foot kicks my side and I use the bounce against the wall to fly up. I catch a hand in my teeth and fall with fingers in my throat. A shadow rises but I am too fast. I throw myself upright and spring. I smash a throat and shake my face like a buzz saw. A hand grabs my middle and I attack the wrist. I’m on the ground. I am a poisonous pig. I am a devil stomach.

They have run. Crying comes from the other room. The floor is a violent painting. My lung is sore. The kids are piling furniture in the doorway. Blocking my way. I hear sobbing. Gurgling. One of them is dying. I regurgitate fingers onto the tile. I can’t go back under the cupboard. No point now. The cold is starting to hurt my underside. I need to go up. I flip over so I can see. The door behind me. The stove and fridge. No way up. I don’t know if I could climb anything anyway. The frozen tile bites my back. I tear my bindings from ice blood as I turn. The screaming has subsided. Melodramatic teen death. Soon they’ll be making a better plan. They’ll kill me fast. Nowhere to go but down. I pull against the tack of ice and reach the cupboard again. I go the other direction this time. There’s a pile of fetid rags. I mount it to see if it’s warmer on top. Snap! A mousetrap bites my side and flies off, hitting a pipe with a high ping. It stings but there’s a burning sensation building around me that feels worse. I smell bleach. I’ve been crawling through bleach. The burn turns into a point against my side. He must have put a hole in me when he stabbed. The bleach is dissolving fat under my skin. I roll quickly on the rags hoping to pull some bleach away. The pain is intensifying. I am moving involuntarily. I turn under the rags, trying to escape. The rags tighten as I twist, constricting my breathing but I can’t stop. My body is trying to flee itself.

Goodbye.

Hello. I’m having a dream. I can see a wide band of red. On it, active lines twitching and bouncing. When two lines touch they are joined. Then they become three and so on. Soon all of the lines are part of discrete tangles evenly spaced along the band. I am aware that the band is trying to impress something on me. That the agitation has resulted in this perfect spacing. I see it all as only inevitable because of the way the band has presented itself. If it wanted to make me feel something, it needed to begin somewhere else. Maybe closer to one cluster as it forms. Or stay in the space between. I don’t know. I feel disappointed with the band. It has tried too hard to say something. It believed it was magic. I don’t know the solution and the band dims. The lines fall to the bottom. This reveals that the dream knew what it was going to say before it said it. And that it used what was nearby to do so. And it ended saying nothing, turning its back and then never having been dreamt.

There is another dream behind it. Much more aggressive, much more certain. It knows that it can fool me into thinking I’m awake in the middle of its story. We’ll see. It takes place in a parallel time. There are no orbits or peels or Syndrome. The sky is blue and the clouds are white and we grew up under them and now we live. I still have no arms or legs or sex organs. But I am slightly different than I was. I can move well. I have company. Many others. Thousands, just like me. We are burrowing and feasting on a dead person’s leg. We are a maggot horde. It is wonderful to feel part of this mass. My face is a black cowl with snips. My body moves in pulses, forward and back, and this is mirrored thousands of times around me. The leg enters my mouth as strands and excites my body so much that my tail twirls, propelling me. I occasionally cross half-eaten maggots. There is some cannibalism here, but I believe it’s caused by ecstatic eating. I accidentally bite into someone. It tastes too sweet. I buckle under to suck more leg. It is becoming liquid under us. It is becoming hot. There is no way we can’t win. I pump my face in and feel pus fill my body. This triggers a reaction I don’t expect. I tumble off the seething limb and land on the ground. It is colder down here and I soon stop moving. I feel my skin pulling up and my guts falling in. I try to move but I am stiff. All of my excitement is drawn in close to my head. I feel like the mass of maggots is now inside me, an infinite number of infinitely small faces. It is a sensation of profound happiness. I am being built.

The building sensation slows to quick random clicks. It stops. I feel air around me, under my skin. I am a distance from my own skin now. I contract a muscle around my eyes and it starts a choir on my back. The singing is deafening and joyful. The singing drives my old skin into the dirt and carries me into a sky made of a million dazzling suns. It is a dream but I am happy for it. Grateful. It was very finely crafted. When I awake I will be more than I was when I fell asleep.

The rags are keeping me from freezing. They have lessened the corrosion. Some of my lower body has sloughed off into my wrap and smells of putrefaction. I hope the bleach can stem advancing infection. I may well be lying in my last place on earth. I have fought very hard not to die. Did I fight too hard? No. It was my point not to die. It was never my point to live. I am a perfect result of the path I took. I hear movement in the kitchen. The barricade is being disturbed. I lay still and listen.

“I don’t see it.”

“Oh, it’s in there.”

“There’s knives in a block by the sink. Just run in and pull a couple out. When you see it just carve the fucking maggot.”

I hear things being moved. Carefully. Something heavy topples and bounces twice. A crack. The floor cracks under weight. A foot in the kitchen. Another crack. Someone is walking.