The n-Body Problem

The audience erupts. It isn’t a cheer, really, more a chorus of shouts—anger and agreement and some dissent and keening. Dixon rushes back to me and violently swings my case in the air.

“It is crying for you! Phehold the tears!”

I am crying. Not for them. Though if there was more to me I might. I cry because I have just discovered that my tongue has been cut from my mouth.

The audience is now spellbound. This got them. I look upward to heaven. I don’t know what I want. I want to be Holy. I want belief from them. I am not human.

Dixon drops me back into place. I see Y reach the centre of the stage. I am sad when he speaks. I remember when he couldn’t.

“Forms are down here to my left. We do have orbit charts and placements for a placement fee. Please line up!”

The door to the case is closed and latched and I am returned to my muffled world. The smell of linen and liniment. The pumps and engines beneath and their hums and puffs. A black cloth is pulled over my case. In the darkness I can see a red dot blink, reflected in the glass.

The next several days are spent like this. I am moved from time to time, but mostly I sit in darkness listening to the little machines attached below. I learn the new smell of my feces, feces which I will never see again. It smells like pencil shavings. Pencil shavings and vinegar. Occasionally I open my mouth and howl. It’s an upsetting sound. A walrus bark. I learn that I do have muscle. Across my back to the two points at the base of my neck. And down to the edges. I use them just to feel them. I tell myself I am going for walks and I flex them. I wish they hadn’t taken my tongue. That is the worst thing. I can no longer say if I am awake or dreaming and have decided they are one and the same.

The audience. The preacher. The forms. The hood is pulled off and the event repeated. I do not cry anymore so now the doctor puts drops in my eyes before I am revealed. Each time it is less crisp, less real. I find myself sailing over their heads, wanting only to be returned to my case and my silence and my darkness.

everyone i see is dead now.

I am planning to escape. It will not be easy. I am a limbless, mute baby in a sealed vault. I can rock. I have been trying this, mostly as a comfort, but my back and stomach muscles are getting stronger. I could wait until I am hoisted up above their heads, with the door thrown open and then I could rock and tip forward and fall. Then what? Fall into someone’s arms. I cannot chose that person or what they will do. I cannot tell them what I want them to do. I can pray. I can pray that I land in the arms of a teen mom who lost her rape baby. She would hold me fast and flee. Take me away from town. To a river winding in a shallow valley. I would suck her breasts. I pray that the milk would make me grow. I would grow arms and legs. I have trouble picturing them though. A nightmare always intrudes. The arms and legs are small bones hanging lose like plastic on a dime store Halloween doll. My tongue inflates and crushes me. An immense scarred manatee attached to the roof of my mouth. No. It’s impossible. If I managed to fall out of this case the crowd would jump back and I’d land in the dirt. My little machines smashed. I would die. I cannot die.

Some of the towns I don’t recognize. We are moving south-eastward I think. I recognize Beeton. Beeton is mad. They press against the stage with their arms straight up. They’re in holy ecstasy. That’s when I realized I truly am a divine relic. I am a piece of cross. A Saint’s tibia. You see? You see us now, Oh Lord? I am pure. No hands to reach out and strike or steal or grope. No legs to run on, to escape justice, to stomp out with. No penis to cram into faces and mouths. No tongue to lie with. I am a singular message. I am here. That is all, Lord. I am here.

Beeton is frightening. These people were waiting for us. Fathers and mothers stepping on their children just to touch the glass of my case. Sick old women draped across the front of the stage like fish dying on a riverbank. We are in the centre of Main Street here. Not in some parking lot, or remote park tucked away. We are now a popular travelling roadshow. Stacks of flyers in shoulder bags. Traffic cops swinging their arms. I spot the mayor on the sidewalk. He has his heavy red sash on. He looks terrified. Aware and sane. There are some, frantic moms pulling their children back. The majority, however, reach for me across the stage. Four teenage girls rush the stage and throw babies over heads. The babies, likely rape babies, are wrapped in bloody blankets. One tumbles out. No arms or legs. No limbs because the limbs have been cut off. They are dead. The teen moms flee amid cheers. Dixon shakes his fists above the fray, pleading and crying to the grey sky. I notice Y on a chair at the edge of the stage. He has a bandage wrapped around his thigh. He must have tried to cut his leg off.

People want to be me.