The n-Body Problem

ChiZine Publications

The n-Body Problem
© 2013 by Tony Burgess
Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr
Interior design © 2013 by Samantha Beiko
Interior illustrations © 2013 by Jason Brown

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition OCTOBER 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-164-9

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CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited and copyedited by Brett Savory
Proofread by Kelsi Morris

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

A completed Craft Project Assignment for the Holiday Arts Mail Order School

Insomnia, for instance, is a death sentence. Used to be the occasional genetic syndrome, Fatal Familial Insomnia, things like that. One in a million. Not now. Now you stop sleeping because you thought a bit too long. It frightened you. And you felt it, maybe while you were doing something else, you slipped . . . you thought about it . . . pictures on the wall . . . suspended with what? Hooks? Hangers? Staples? Nails? What? You push them into the wall with your own strength . . . like a pea into gravy. Swallow by the wall. A bird entered a cloud. And none of it. Not one stick of light or dark had a thing to do with sleep. That’s how you do it. You don’t change the picture. You destroy picturing.

It is probably because of the sky that we now walk looking down. We focus our eyes on the hard imperfect dirt, the anamorphic islands in hardwood slats, the infant memory picked into marks on linoleum. In fact, so obsessed have we become in reading the flat earth that we now bump into each other more often, and we are warned about this danger, we are told to look up, not high not above us, but in front, so we can see obstacles, see the things we want, the place we are going; so we may read the world as nature had intended us to, as something before us. For many people the problem then becomes one of scale. The cracks become canyons, the piece of glass a crystal mountain. There is great wrong in this, and we know it—a grain of sand wasn’t given to us to carry on our backs like beasts, we were not put here to drag cherries by the stem. But now, it is the dream we dream. It is our wish to be as far away from the sky as possible, to soak our perspective in the fizz under rotting leaves. And so we stare downward as we walk, judging the things around us like bats do, and we fail, slapping into poles and posts and each other. It’s a price we grimly accept, to look upward as little as we can. To be concentrating on a place we are not, but could be, were we only so much smaller, so much farther from the sky.

The sky is there, though, perhaps even more there than ever, since it is the pressure that has stuck our eyes with push pins into the lawn. The sky is the power over us, it is what makes us want to live so far away from what we are. People have stabbed themselves, forks in the eyes, skewers through the ears, some have shoved ropes down their throats and poured hot glue across their eyelids. I try to do my best, looking outward, I’m still approved for SSRIs and mild anti-psychotics, so I’m still finding solutions day to day, moment by moment. I’ve kept the docs in the dark about the serotonin syndrome I can feel growing. It’s another obsessive scale to avoid. Nerve endings, neurotransmitters deformed by clouds of serotonin. It’s hard to resist sometimes, being a fighter pilot on a synthetic molecule with shape dive-bombing receptors, living life like this, in a skyless, groundless wobble of shapes warring with each other, desperate to recognize a recess somewhere, anywhere that resembles my ship, so I can plug myself in once and for all and be made warm and light and essential.

You can desire life here, imagine it. The challenges are great but you have leather boots on and a cap with swinging straps and you don’t need to know if the world thinks you’re a hero or not. You are. You are because you don’t care if you live or die. And that is better than walking down a street, clenching and unclenching your fists in the hope that you can bring wellness back into them. That is hopeless. If you feel cancer and childishness is where you are walking to, then all is lost. Nothing is possible. It is always and forever better to have never been born.