The n-Body Problem

The news is a long list of services available in Toronto. Food Banks. Shelters. Some work available. Not much. Daycare places. Places to take babies. Leave babies. The wave of rape that ended a year ago has yielded a baby boom. Generation Rape. The last, probably. The babies are either abandoned or fought over. Some folks love the rape babies and some hate them. Pediatrics is the only branch of medicine, the only hospital department, that still deals in old body. A few months back a visible part of the female population was pregnant. I think that, as much as anything, sank us. We became horrible to each other. The species is dying of shame.

A commercial comes on for WasteCorp. Lot of sunshine in these ads. Time lapse photography of yellow tulips becoming vertical in yellow light. Robins hooping straw on a backyard tool shelf. It’s easy to hate these commercials and reasonable to do so, but there’s no mistaking the way they make you feel. The TV becomes a full-spectrum light box for thirty seconds and people crane in, like basking dandelions. The lump in my mouth has changed a bit. It’s a fat disc now. I picture myself turning scissors this way and that trying to feel my way to the first snips. Or do I carve an X in the chin and draw the thing out with pliers? Not worth thinking about. I’ll know what to do when I do it.

News story about the thickening lattice. It’s an interesting feature of orbit. Was a selling point for a while. The bodies orbit in layers, or skins as they’re called, and when the skins get too deep, I think the number was 30,000 or so, then the innermost skin starts to breakdown. This was supposed to insure that the structure wouldn’t become too dense or too thick. Never really worked. Whatever architecture’s going on up there is evolving on its own. The other feature of the peel was that bodies would re-enter the atmosphere in a controlled way. They would burn in the sky and enter the thin stratosphere as ash. We would be able to see this at sunset. It would be natural. It would be poetry. Except it doesn’t always happen like that. Some years there’s no peel at all. The lattice becomes tighter. The light more fragile. Life on earth, with no outward sign of apocalypse, is suspended by despair.

There’s a story on the news about a major event over India. It’s the kind of peel we see more these days. Millions of bodies at once. A massive inverted volcano in the sky over Mumbai. A funnel of hot ash and charnel debris hits the city and chokes it out. Thousands can die in these events. Their lungs fill with blood and their skin burns under accumulating death paste. WasteCorp moves in quick. The dead are conveyed. Everything starts again. It is unusual to see this actually on the news. Usually they show the inverted cone and the fierce pyroclastic ring and it’s sold as a wonder, as a stunning phenomena. A murmuration of the dead. The images they’re showing now, of people lying down in the streets, is rare to see. Reminds me of the term “first responders.” Not many of those around anymore.

The news ends and I notice X hasn’t eaten anything. It occurs to me that he isn’t all that different than the dead. His movements are a little more purposeful, sure, but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t act on his own. I wonder what’s in this kid. Honestly, he could be extremely minimal. An imitation of the new dead. I wonder if that’s not a pretty good survival strategy. No thought, no danger. A reboot of Barnaby Jones on the TV. Columbian. Starring Jose Marins.

“What’s this shit?”

I’m trying to see if X is there or not. He just stares.

“There’s a guy after us. Old friend. He’s gonna want to kill us.”

Nothing.

“We’re gonna have to sleep on the roof. Safest place.”

X reaches over and grabs a stick of celery. He returns the hand to his lap. No eating. He’s telling me not to talk to him.

I’ve been alone for my whole life, but this is a bit much.

dixon.

My mind has wandered. I have come to believe that I have Barrett’s Syndrome or possibly esophageal cancer. When I swallow it’s like my throat is too dry to complete the task. There’s a constriction at the base. A burr beneath my collar bone. A bleeding white cluster of throat tubers. Voles scuttling through thin tunnels. Honeycomb tongue. It’s probably because I spoke for the first time in a while. It felt unnatural. It triggered the picture. My serotonin syndrome has advanced alarmingly. I definitely have colonized stem cells. Neurotransmitter flower boxes. I need to inventory. I need to find items I can organize. I turn the TV off. It may well be giving me advanced throat cancer. I need a good honest list.