Tony Burgess - The n-Body Problem

I have sat quietly for half an hour. The boy too. He was patient while I suffered. Now I am sitting upright. I have good breathing. The pain is all old. Echo. I am less worried about formulating. Less obsessed. I have two things in my vision that I’ll have to accept. One is a red and purple egg just off centre. The other is a thick line across the bottom. If I look up, the line widens. It looks like a face. Talking. If I look down, it disappears. Not gonna kill me. It’s good to have reminders. Like an oil light on the dash. I see you but I can drive. Big road ahead. The boy is calm. His boy scout uniform looks ridiculous. I get up and he follows.

Short round Indian man in Stedmans. Behind him a rainbow of long shoehorns. Two feet long. He smiles and wheezes. Did you know that there are things about emphysema that are pleasurable? It’s true. Your lungs can feel soft. Your body’s gratitude for small oxygen is thrilling. You can feel great. I ask about kids clothes. He waves to a rack of things by the ties.

The kid is thin. I grab a t-shirt. Pale blue. Wolf. Nah.

“Pick something.”

The kid looks up. He warily brushes the clothes. Performing, at first, self-conscious, then he makes a choice. I admire this. See who sees you. Then get what you want. He picks a plain brown t-shirt and some jeans. No socks, no underwear. The runners he has on are fine. He strips in the middle of the store and tosses the boy scout shit onto a table of candles. I catch the clerk watching us in the security mirror. Whatever, man. You look like a fuckin’ duck.

The Youth Drop-in has been merged with an AA meeting in the back of an auto body shop. Teenagers and coffee-sipping drunks mix outside. In the past this would be a scene of terrible rape and probably beating. Maybe even death. Now, its all little cheese fingers and cigarette smoke stuck to faces. I wish the kid would talk. He has not spoken once.

I get through the small group and enter the building. It’s a lunchroom for the employees. Chairs in a circle. Some pastries on a glass plate. I have to look down for a second to see a woman with long grey hair and a guitar. I gasp. The face opens up along that line again. That’s going to bother me in time.

“Hi there. I’m Bob.”

Not my name. The woman looks up, her face behind long grey hair.

“Well, hi, Bob. I’m Ashley.”

We both look at the boy for a moment, then look away.

“You’re welcome here.”

There are slogans on the walls. A picture of Jesus.

“Really. You are.”

I can’t look down. The talking face is distracting. Like a TV. I want to hear what’s being said on it.

“Good. Thank you.”

Still can’t look. Makes it harder. I sit. There. The egg settles above the line. Fuckin’ stroke.

“Can I ask you a question, Ashley?”

Ashley bangs a thumb softly on a string.

“Shoot.”

“You know pretty much everybody who comes out to this?”

Ashley frowns deeply and thinks.

“The regulars. Yeah. Why? You looking for someone?”

I lean forward, elbows to knees. Ashley smiles at the kid.

“I am, yes. He’s a thin guy. Gotta funny haircut.”

Ashley gives me a hard look.

“That’s weird. Why would you be looking for him?”

“You’ve seen him? You know him?”

Ashley appears to think again. A performance. Neurotic. She pretends to feel things. Acts like she knows.

“Nope. And I know everybody who comes to these meetings. Nobody new. Nobody different.”

That’s not what you said at first. Not precisely.

There’s hollering outside. Ashley looks at me. She’s still pretending to think about the guy I’m looking for. She thinks, then shakes her head no. I don’t like the hollering outside. Neither does the kid. He’s turned in his chair. It’s 6:45 p.m. The door opens. A teenage girl. She is dramatic. Old Fashioned.

“Chris is on the ground.”

I stand outside the circle around Chris. He is having a seizure. It’s raining. Warm rain. The kids are hugging each other and weeping. The drama teen is down beside Chris.

“No, Chris. No! You can’t die! You can’t! I’ll never find you!”

Chris stops seizing. His hair is soaked. His face the colour of shrimp. He’s sick alright. He’s burning. I can see blood surfacing on his finger tips. He coughs up bright blood. One of his eyes slips below the socket. Thick fluids fill the space. This is viral. Virus is rare. A perfect storm. The receptors have to take territory in the stem cells. Your body has to make the virus. Give it life. Frankenstein. He coughs again and a mist of blood covers his forehead.

Since I’m not certain if these Frankensteins are physically present and therefore contagious, I push the boy back. I don’t need to be here.

The boy and I slip away. The girl falls on Chris, wailing. We hear a muffled plumph noise then a scream. Some part of his body has just released contents on her.

Twenty years ago. That’s when people stopped dying properly. They were dead inasmuch as they stopped being people. But they were alive because they never ceased to move. They didn’t walk. They didn’t do things. They just moved. A strange gentle agitation. Like Parkinson’s disease that kept on post-mortem.

At first, we were terrified of them. We thought they would kill us. I don’t know why. We thought that the only reason the dead aren’t dead is because they wanted to kill us. So, we waged war on them. Shooting them and setting them on fire. We ran from them. We quarantined people in stadiums. We believed that terrible violent things were happening. It was often repeated on the news—the dead were eating us. In time their numbers grew. The dead were forming enormous masses. Twitching masses. All across the world. In time, economies began to collapse. Wars ended quietly. Leaders slipped away. We didn’t totally cave in. Some took hold of the structures, the culture, the daily life and they looked past, believing this was a solvable problem. They noticed, and soon we all did, that the dead were not hurting us. They were harmless.

It took a long time for this fact to spread into the population. Some never bought it and committed horrible acts of hate on the dead. Some destroyed the dead for sport. Some kept parts in collections. Some wore moving fingers on chains. Still do. There’s a complicated, deviant culture pretty much everywhere these days.

When some calm returned, when a majority was finally convinced that the dead meant no harm—in fact, meant nothing—then solutions became possible. This was a waste disposal problem. The dead numbered in the many hundreds of millions. And they made up mountains of bodies. Like water droplets running into each other to create flowing water. They didn’t mean to hurt us, but they threatened life in other ways. They became immovable. We didn’t know it at first but their biggest threat was invisible: we were now, all of us, thinking about them and thinking about them all the time.

Governments, or at least what was left of them, turned to the private sector for tenders. Dispose of these things in an efficient and reasonable way. Keep costs down. Make it sustainable. Many proposals became popular. At one time, enormous cremating ovens were erected in Africa. They had incredible capacity. They recorded over a hundred thousand cremations a day. It was impressive. Iron ovens the size of cruise liners. Clean white smoke woven in the clouds. Still, weightless ash flowing on the wind into desert lands.

It was the pictures that killed it though. Bulldozed bodies piled in the ovens. The filthy heat and fire. It was, to many, a ghost. The holocaust. The iron cross and the metal letters. There were others who saw the bodies burn and believed we were constructing hell. We were Satan’s architects and builders. Others, sentimental ones, just couldn’t bear the thought of an uncle or sister twitching in the dark centres of these body balls, then being burned.