Tony Burgess - The n-Body Problem

They think I’m an animal or a demon. They don’t know I can hear them and understand them. I am not going to just offer my soft body to their knives. No. I am buried in caustic rags in a dark confined space. No one is going to take a chance on this. I hear the knife sing a high note as it leaves the block. His feet are so close. I could dive to them from here. Cram his heel in my mouth and dislodge it with a single flex of jaw. He would fall backwards. No heel. The knife would fall. I’d fly across him like a crow and yank his face clear off with a cinching tear. The rest would of them would faint of fright. They would give up. Wander off. Freeze to death on the hard ash.

I stay. Who can say what would happen? Cupboards are opened. He yells and jumps back every time. The door to the rags is opened. A knife is plunged into my cheek. He pulls the knife but it’s imbedded in bone and I come out with it, hanging in the air, twisting and howling. He drops me and bounds back up the barricade.

“I got it! I got it!”

I turn against the blade and ease it from my face. I see two heads peering over the pile. I killed the other two.

“It’s still alive! Go back in! Finish it off!”

“No! No!”

A heavy black log sails in over the barricade and shatters beside me.

“What are you doing?”

I fire a dead mouse from my ass. When did it crawl up there?

“Burn the fucking thing!”

The coals are spread across the floor and are melting tile. Another log. There are flames on the wall and in the box I hid behind.

I have to go down. These two will die. They will end up combined and moving like Paula and Petra in the ashes of this house. I will escape down.

I return to the rags and press my cheek. I will do this until the flames are close. I have to slow the bleeding. I see a dark triangle in the back corner of the adjacent cupboard. I launch myself at it and slip through. There is a wide plastic pipe. I try to move along it like an inchworm but the surface is too smooth and I slip off. Hit the concrete floor very hard and have to lie still. They are burning the house down to kill me. I manage to fill my lung again and roll over. I hear the floor above me crackling and the air in the kitchen start to hammer. This house will go up fast and all the children will die. Fire goes up. I go down. The house will come down eventually. I try to move. My skin has dissolved into linen. The hole in my side is like a deep canker. I have had a long knife in my face today. My one lung is scorched with ammonia. The children will die in my funeral pyre. I look for the place I want to die.

Discs of fire slip in and out under the door at the top of the stairs. Its blue-tip fingers have lifted all the tile. I would like to picture the kids not escaping but they might, after all. I feel the expectation that I should release them. That I should give life back while mine goes. But really, what can I practically do? I let you live. I can’t even say it. I have no tongue and even if I could, the roar of the fire would drown my voice. And even if it didn’t, even if it was heard, say, in the sky above the house, spoken by birds and repeated by rabbits, there is nothing in the words to shrink the flame or dim the heat. Even if there were birds and rabbits to speak them. So I am safe to say that they should live, that that is my last wish because I know that they will not. The fire is bounding down the stairs like a Slinky. Part of the house leans and opens an edge. They will burn in here or freeze out there. I hope that they are safe.

I feel solved now. There are two sumps in the floor. One has a pump the other not. The sump was designed hundreds of years ago and dedicated as a tomb. I roll. I approach the sump at an angle so my bottom enters first. Skin is gone in places and seared tough in others. I decide not to feel pain for a sec. My bottom hits crumpled chicken wire that compresses under my weight. I slide in. I am a nematode in a grub’s back. What I am doing is repeated in nature. I fill the sump. The floor is level with my chin. It is warmer in here, close as I can be to the hot centre of the earth. I feel colossal. I think that in the moments before you die, your body assumes things. I fit perfectly in this hole.

Stone in water. Corner in water. Joists in water. Kids in water. Sub-basement in water. Water in water. Stone in ash. Corner in ash. Joists in ash. Kids in ash. Sub-basement in ash. Ash in ash.

Plastics bent. Stone in plastic. Corner in plastic water. Kids in ash. Sub-basement in plastic. Plastic in plastic. Joists. Water. Water. Stone. Plastic. Kids. Ash. Window is Q. Stairs are ash. Window.

I can’t say this story right now.

Brick is over. Water is over. Window is Q. Ash is ash. Kids are ash. Sub-basement is ash. Water is ash. Plastic is black. Ash is black. Sub-basement is black. Window is black. Black in water. Water in black water. Brick is over. Brick is over. Water is plastic. Water is black plastic. Puddle in plastic. Water in ash. Ash is over. Puddle in brick. Kids in puddle. Sub-basement in puddle. Window is Q. Ash is Q. Q is over.

Some minutes in.

The man is a maggot with no arms or legs or genitals wrapped in a sopping foul rag. He has risen on flood waters from a sump in a burned-out basement. A single lung is emptied of water and filled with air for ballast. The man is a bandaged toe. He is conveyed on slow-moving ash. It is enough to call trees by name. Birch. Ash. Maple. Poplar. Cedar. White Pine. Blue Spruce.

More minutes in.

Jackson Pine. An entire cloud. Sand in ash. If the water recedes it will leave a wide gasket of brackish gel. The bandaged toe is turned by a rock. There is a thing called a bunny. Not here. Not now. But there is. The water isn’t revealing its vertical face. Its pirate hat. But there it is. Half in and half out. An entire cloud.

Not minutes. Not right now.

The culverts clear the water from the land and the graded roads breach like whales. The trucks are all in pots of ash and the silos are upright. The deer are a carcass and the coyote are alone. There are things that people made by hand and what they are. Pollen is picked from bark and sound is watching this spread. There is no rhythm to things. Not right now.

I am lying on a flat stone. The ash flow moves around it. I have lost all sensation. My nerve endings have been cut by bleach. I have to share my lung with my septic heart. My brain. Oh, well.

The sky is mighty blue. So blue it looks like sky. The sun is fire. Burning gas. I feel this on my flat rock. The ultra violet light. The radiation reaching my sides by bouncing off the flat rock. I have to turn my face from the direct rays. I am a bean from a can. I am sniffing the sun as it lands. This is a real sky. I turn on the rock to pull my robes off. I am a bean from a can. Is this the real sky? I turn to the east. A dark cloud. I smell rainwater.

It is the thing we haven’t seen in ten long years. It is the thing we were told might never return. Our bodies in the sky prevented it. The red takes up the orange and they curve. A yellow path lined with green. Blue. Indigo. Violet. We have left the sky. Returned its flags. Apologized.

Rainbow.

For Rachel Jones, my true love.

Thanks to Charlie Baker for constructing and implementing the n-Body Code.

Derek McCormack for his fine eyes and ears on these pages. Thanks also to his hardships—they are exploited here.

Great thanks to the family ChiZine—Savory, Kasturi, Beiko, Morris.

Erik Mohr for the boss cover and Jason Brown for the interior illustrations.