Tony Burgess - The n-Body Problem

I slide my pan onto a counter with the other pans.

There are three long tables set up. Forks, spoons, knives. Ketchup. Men sitting, looking alive for the most part. You can see some infections. Bad ones. Ears running. There’s one guy being led to the table by a boy. Eyes are fog-white. Glaucoma maybe. Bet he didn’t have that when he woke up this morning. No cancer anyway. You can smell that shit. Kills within hours.

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.

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 crack 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.