The n-Body Problem (5 page)

I find about twelve cedar planks in the garage. Sit and lift them to my nose one at a time, inhaling hungrily. These are old cedar, maybe even predating the orbit. Real sunlight made them. The effect is gorgeous. I am lifted into memories I’ve never had. Runnning down a dock and leaping into cold water. On a high ladder hanging a birdhouse. Lying in the bottom of a boat.

X interrupts.

“What’s up?”

X stands. I bet he can’t be alone.

“Check out this wood. Want to build something?”

X hops down the step into the garage. I nod. He has just distinguished himself from the dead. The dead don’t hop. I give him the upturned bucket I’m sitting on and look at the narrow worktable. The smell of spruce. Faint though.

“Let’s build something, man.”

I turn to X sitting on the bucket. He is sniffing the cedar. His eyes are closed. It’s an instinctive thing to do, I guess. A natural hunger.

“Ok. That’s fine with me.”

I sit on the floor beside him and lift a plank to my nose.

X opens his eyes and sees me pushing my face into the wood. X laughs.

This makes my stomach roll over. It’s like an overly rich meal. I try to keep from throwing up. This is too good to lose.

It isn’t easy getting out on the roof, let alone dragging what we need up there. I find a rope ladder in an upstairs closet. It’s part of a emergency fire escape kit. Flashlight and water and a blanket. I lean out a top floor window and hammer the ladder to the facia board. A bit startled to see a school bus stop at a house near the corner. A child leaves his mother at the end of the driveway and boards the bus. It’s easy to forget that everyone’s situation is different. Who knows what goes on in that house. On that bus. Or the school. I peer back through the window. X hasn’t seen it.

We hand-ferry two sleeping bags and pillows up to the roof. And some sheets to hold us in. We’ll do this at the back of the roof so we can’t be seen. It’s a pretty simple, crude rig, the only drawback being the last time I did this was with Dixon in Daychopan about twenty-one years ago. Dix won’t think of it. We lay the bags and pillows out, then the sheets across. We nail the edges like a canvas stretched in a frame. X has had noticeably more life since the cedar and that’s good. I need the hands. Thought I might.

We slip down into the bags and test the strength. It’s a steep roof so my body pulls pretty good, but I put the roofing nails in a tight stitch patter. Should hold. It’s not raining, which is rare and lucky, but that could change. We’ll be sleeping in rainwater barrels if it does. X is swallowed by his rig. I have to help him up. I show him how to keep his arms over and the bag from under his armpits to clip himself in. He follows instruction well. Damn cedar is helping us both, I think. The sun will go down soon. We lie still and look up at the sky.

The sky.

I stare into the sun sitting low. You can’t see them. One billion obstructions moving invisibly across the setting sun.There is usually cloud cover, but not tonight. The sky is wide and clear. I study it, as everybody does, for its difference. There is a black sparkle in the sun’s corona. That’s been there for a few years. The blue turns green around the horizon. And there’s a pink flicker midway up. Fancy cocktail colours. Strawberry, lime, apple, blue Curaçao. Solid syrupy light. You feel that it must be sticky to touch. The thin clouds stuck like cotton candy to a wall. That might be why it’s overcast so often. The cloud canopy gets snagged to the tacky sky above. There is my stroke egg, like a too-close planet. Looks like it belongs up there. These colours appear at sunset. During the day the blue is different only because you imagine it must be.

I check X. Still clipped in. He isn’t looking up. I reach across and touch his face. It’s warm. There is some warmth coming from the sun still. Some radiation sneaking through. Pieces of the spectrum, the vitamins in fault lines and thin spots. Reminds me that I forgot to take my vitamin D drops. Can’t miss those. Makes your autoimmune go crazy if you do. MS. Lupus. Strange allergies. My arm turned to bloody rubble once, after a mosquito bite. Took months of Benadryl, which had its own knockoff effects. The arm is still grey. X looks at me. Or it’s not the sun. It’s a fever. Maybe he’ll die up here, in the next few hours.

“You think we’ll get any sleep tonight?”

X looks at me, into my eyes. He nods. The effect on me is powerful and sudden. He strokes the back of my neck while I sob. It’s something I never feel. I am grieving for my species. I am grieving for everyone. It is an emotion with no real history and it shatters you when it comes. I love people. I want to be one again. But this will never ever happen. X is pushing a water bottle to my mouth. He doesn’t want me to cry all the water from my body. I drink. I can’t cry and drink at the same time. I hand the water back to X. Thank Christ that doesn’t happen very often. Some people get started and never stop. Not me. I have a cold side. Smooth and silent and cold. I try to restore it. The water rolls down the cold stones stacked in my chest.

“Thanks. Sorry.”

X has turned his head. He doesn’t want to hurt me again. Irony is I feel my chest shake at the thought of him protecting me.

Car door slam. From the driveway. Dixon.

I place my hand firmly on X and he turns. I put my finger to my lips. Like he’s gonna talk. The front door bangs closed. X and I lie perfectly still. Dixon will walk the house. He’ll see Petra dancing on the rope. Paula squirming under water. Did I leave stalk ends on the counter? Will he pick up and check the wilt of celery? Know the time when it was cut? After the hanging and the stomping? Will he figure this out? If he does he’ll know where I am. He’ll check the room upstairs. The emergency kit on the floor. Did we close the window? He’ll see the ladder.

I listen. I test the sheets. We are butterflies pinned to matte board. Already dead. Embalmed. He’ll torture us lying here before he kills us. He wants me to suffer more than anything. He wants me to beg for my life.

Bang. Front door. Wait. Clunk. Car door. The engine whines.

I exhale. He has come and gone. He lost my trail. He forgot about our roof trick. X senses that I have relaxed and turns to me. I smile. It’s not bad. It doesn’t hurt. He smiles back. I want to take this now. I put my hand on his head and he pushes it against my palm. I feel we are together. If we die up here tonight, of typhus or AIDS or madness or the flu, we will die having seen each other. And then, who knows? Maybe we’ll hang up there in the same spot and feel that sun for the first time. See the earth. This is a happiness, but I’m not stupid. It’s just as dangerous as a sadness. Happiness removes suppression. It makes you want to die. I feel heat against my back.

A pigtail of black smoke runs across the eaves. Dixon knows exactly where I am. He has set the house on fire. He’ll have used an accelerant. I push up and feel flop sweat on my chest. I pull at the roofing nails and the sheet tears. X is turning in his bag unable to free himself. My first impulse is to leave him to die. He’s going to hold me back, get us both killed. Then I remember and pull his sheet with two fists. Flames appear around one edge then another. The roof will drop soon. It will fold around us any moment. X runs to the peak, but that’s where the fire will punch through first. I throw myself flat and grab his ankle. He drops and slides uncontrollably down the steep pitch. X disappears into a high funnel of flame.

I have nothing left to do but follow.

There is no air in my lungs. There is no sound in my ears. I can smell my body burning. Nothing is visible but the tiny stroke egg and the anamorphic line. And heat. I am hung before the sun.

X is putting me out with a garden hose. I can see him naked in the alley covered in his mother’s shit, trying to get away from the icy water. I feel we are amazing friends. In the shock, entire years of our adventure passes through me.

The time we stayed with that widow in a shack by the pond. How we buried her kin for her.

The time we hunted deer on the escarpment and saw a lynx. And a hognose snake. Yes! And we met other hunters at the top. They were drinking and we started drinking and shooting our rifles at fungus on a birch tree.

The time we rushed to the water’s edge. The time we saw the egret. The massive shell of a roadside turtle. Its head was the size of a hockey helmet.

We had trouble one winter living in an abandoned blind. It was a bad idea. You can’t tell how cold it’s going to get. How high the snow will drift. And the wind. Remember those nights. We slept with our fingers in our ears.

I can feel where I am but I can’t be there. I have no heart and no mind. No body. I am tiny scales on the hunched back of a great golden carp. Each scale like a tiny screen that pulls at me with story. Light pulls me into the fish’s side. I am in the care of curled carp. Minnows. Waterborne lint. I am its telescopic mouth. Barbels. Bluegills.

Blue. Blue water. Blue sky.

We are in a shed. Probably still on the property. I am wrapped in a mulch bag from a lawn tractor.

“Why are we hiding?”

That was X. I try to talk but my throat is closed around a cancer in my thyroid. This is why I am sick.

“I don’t fucking get it,” X says, turns to me. He has a cloth and he stuffs it in my mouth. Cold water fills the spaces between my teeth.

“Suck on that. We leave here soon.”

I obey. I feel a sharp line across my upper stomach. Duodenitits. Esophagitis. Not fatal things on their own but they are never on their own.

X is watching me and I close my eyes.
I lay my hands on my belly. It feels distended, wobbly. There are many reasons why this could be happening. Daylight penetrates my eyelids.

“Here. See if you need anything,” he says.

I look down at a small greasy box X has placed at my side. I expect to see machine parts and am surprised by pill bottles of various size. Lean to my side. The belly pulls down and out.

I pull one. Effexor. Another. Xanax. Others. Mostly SSRIs and benzo. This shit speeds up the receptor ganglia in stems. This shit is shit. This is why doctors don’t see us anymore. I pull the cloth from my mouth.

“Where’d this come from?”

X doesn’t answer. He stands by the shed door.

“X! Hey! Where’d this shit come from?”

X turns.

“That’s not my name.”

I sit and my middle doesn’t fold in, it falls.

“What is this?”

X crouches beside me. He has a silver spike, snapped off the bottom of a sprinkler. “Do you think it’s crazy out there?”

I rattle the box. He’s been taking these. The short-term effect is always diminished symptoms. Long term, it’s all syndrome.

“Why am I looking in a box of shit?”

“I broke into a few houses. Took whatever I could remember my mom taking. She said it kept her alive.”

That means some people died. You can’t just stop taking this stuff. Not anymore. I did. I had to taper down to grains. Over months. I still have syndrome, but I know I bought some time ditching these. Now I take oils. Moderates the immune system responses. That’s the best. Evening primrose. Flax seed. Fish oil. And Vitamin D. Fuck with brain chemistry and you die soon.

“Throw this out. This is bad fuel. Here.”

I drag my bag off my shoulder and dump the oils and D.

“I’ll share these.”

X looks sceptical.

“But my Mom—”

“Your Mom dissolved in her own shit.”

X gives me a look. His hand around that spike. I return the look. I’m not trying to be an asshole. He loosens. Thinks. That’s right. You listen.

“If you’re gonna steal, steal things we can use. Memorize these labels. This stuff we’re gonna need.”

He lowers his head and examines the cod liver oil.

“How bad do you think it is out there?” X nods to the light. The SSRIs and benzos have given him swagger.

“I don’t know, man. Probably bad. Put down the spike.”

X holds it firm and raises a cocky eyebrow—you sure about that?

“Please.”

I reach over and hold the back of his hand. The spike falls.

“Okay,” he says. “Why are we hiding? What are we doing?”

Fuck. Those damn pills sure jack up the moti-vation.

“How old are you?”

“I think I’m around thirteen.”

I nod. A little older than I first thought. But it’s feasible. Especially now that he’s accelerated his gangster puberty.

“Okay. I have to make a decision, X.”

“My name is Y.”

“Y.”

I sit up farther. My belly prevents my knees from rising.

“I have to decide whether I bring you along or whether I put you down.”

Y is crushed by this. Glassy eyes start to fill.

“Not put you down. Not really. Listen. This is my work. I’m working. And if I haul you along with me you have to understand the job and you have to let me be your boss. I mean your total boss.”

Y thinks. He picks up the spike and taps it on the tip of his sneakers. He speaks without looking up.

“What’s the job.”

“Kill a guy.”

He loves that.

“Who?”

“A guy, I said.”

Y nods, like he thinks this sounds doable. He’s all bluff. I could knock his lights out so easy.

“When?”

“When? I don’t know when.”

Y bites his lip. Reasonable, he thinks. That’s reasonable.

“The guy who burned the house out from under us,” I say.

Y’s eyes widen, darken. There’s real ugly in a child on SSRIs and benzos.

“Let’s kill that fuckin’ guy, then.”