Shoulder the Sky (4 page)

Heck, we were both a couple of geeks but, I had always thought, well-adjusted geeks, in a world that was soon to be ruled by geeks like us: non-smokers, smarter than we let on, not particularly attractive to girls or women, young men who handed in acceptable homework assignments and went to bed early.

Darrell offered me half of his tuna sandwich. His mother always cut it in half to form two rectangles. My own mother never failed to cut corner to corner, creating
two perfect triangles. If she made tuna fish, she would always put fresh dill or fennel in it. I accepted the tuna fish and Darrell brushed his hands theatrically, leaned over, and pulled a dozen eggs out of his book bag. He placed the egg container in front of him and, like he was opening some box of precious jewels, he lifted the lid.

“I've come to the conclusion I was leading a much too sheltered life. As you know, I studied the Klingon dictionary and became somewhat proficient in the language. But it wasn't until I found myself staying up late conversing on a chat room in Klingon with people all over the planet — for up to two hours at a time — that I realized I needed to get out of the house and do something a bit more ambitious with my life.”

“Now you're raising chickens?”

“No.”

“Ukrainian egg decorating?”

“Get serious.”

“I give. What are you doing with the eggs?”

“Revenge,” was Darrell's one word answer.

Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

Human kind has never perfected alternatives to war, but there must ultimately be alternatives. Simple co-operation between people and countries is probably not sexy enough. Deep inside the grey matter of our brains, they say, we are still basically lizards. If you dig further, we are probably just amoebas, but we don't think like amoebas anymore (the exception being the writers and producers of most TV sitcoms).

Our reptilian brains seize on territorial notions, convincing our weaker rational brains that we have legitimate reasons for organized violence, and we become aggravated and aggressive.

It is my contention that we are not evolving into anything more advanced than we now are — at least our brains are not evolving. We may end up without a little toe or a thumb but we will still have urges to do harm and to wage war.

Since evolution will not save us from ourselves — in fact, it may make us more aggressive — we must seek alternatives.

Darrell really didn't have that many enemies. He was more enamoured with the idea of revenge than with any Edgar Allan Poetic obsession to do harm to those he hated.

Holding up a brown egg in front of the intergalactic screen saver on his computer, he said, “Behold, the perfect creative weapon.”

“Some would see it as a food source.”

“That troubled me at first. I was buying at the supermarket and wondering if there were alternatives. I asked the guy working the aisles what they do with old eggs.”

“Old eggs?”

“Ones that have been in the store too long. Unsold eggs. They must go somewhere. It turns out there's a company that buys them — dirt cheap. I tracked it down and found the place. Went there on the bus. They use old eggs to cook up and then freeze dry or something.
I was afraid to ask too much. But I asked the guy if I could buy some old eggs from him. I said I was doing experiments. Research. Now I have a guilt-free source of cheap eggs.”

On my own, I would never have achieved the same drive and passion for focused or even random egg violence that Darrell had, but I was still on my quest for an emotional outlet and here was an opportunity not to be passed up. It was a vice far more addicting than tobacco, and we both quickly passed from focused acts of egg revenge to random acts of egg aggression.

Darrell was my tutor. At first we were pretty adolescent about it all. Eggs placed on the chairs of less favoured teachers. Eggs placed on fluorescent light fixtures in classrooms, hair-triggered on their perch, sure to drop if anyone so much as slammed a door. A more subtle approach to in-school egg activity was a simple egg with a pin hole or two placed in the back of a teacher's desk drawer or perhaps in an unlucky locker. Eventually the egg would rot and the smell would be sulfuric, odoriferous, and downright diabolic. Eggs rolled down the aisles of buses to be squashed by the feet of third graders.

When the work crew came to begin to clear the woods behind the school for a new shopping mall, we smeared eggs on the windshields of trucks and dozers. Later we would learn that smearing cheese on car windows
was another way to wreak havoc with the so-called civilized world.

We never threw eggs at people. We had our limits. We did pitch a couple dozen eggs at cigarette billboards and the signs of a few wrong-headed hopeful candidates in an upcoming election.

The Egg Man and I kept our identities nicely concealed. The school authorities were well aware of the “egg problem.” There had been small editorials railing against us in the local paper. Rotten eggs were turning up all over the school. There was talk of having to close the school for fear of harmful health effects.

And so Darrell and I decided one day, walking home from school, that our egg careers were over. We had become egg junkies and enjoyed the thrill of revenge on a world gone mad, but it had gone far enough.

As mysteriously as the egg raids began, they stopped, except for a smattering of copycat egg vandals who were quickly caught, and then punished by their humiliated parents.

Dave knew what we had been up to but he said he had sworn some oath that he could never rat on one of his clients. I think he got some kind of second-hand satisfaction from our insanely juvenile deeds. But he was disappointed when I told him that I did it all without malice. As my mother would have said, “It was just a phase I had to go through.”

My father didn't know that I was the subject of the anti-egg vandal editorials, and Lilly didn't care. She had her own stash of anger. She had garnered a monopoly on all the anger available in our family.

I went back to being even more normal than I'd been before. I slept well at night and dreamed of flying. When I woke in the morning I was neither happy nor sad to see the new day. Raining or sunshine, it all pretty much meant the same to me. Darrell went back to trying to hack into Microsoft. We communed at lunch over the triviality of life. I did well in school. I missed the feel of a perfectly formed egg fitted into the palm of my hand and that was about it.

Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

I'm pretty sure there are intelligent alien beings living among us. They live on another plane of existence, though, and we can't really detect them except with our minds. They are responsible for much of the unexplainable stuff that goes on out there. Lost socks, for example. Unlike our expectations, the invisible aliens are not highly intelligent. Just because you live on another plane of existence doesn't mean you are ultra-smart.

They are, however, better at bridging the barrier between our physical world and their world. They can pick up our television broadcasts, and this has convinced them not to invent their own version of TV. Their
best scientists, however, after decades of research, devised a method for stealing socks from our world.

That's where your socks go — one at a time, never by twos. They have been unable to develop a means to transport two socks at a time to their world. If ever someone comes up with an accidental match, those socks are highly prized possessions in the other world.

It is not a mirror universe or anything like that. There is no version of “you” there. The inhabitants are not happier or sadder than us. They have their own version of ice cream and they have holidays — one even commemorating the first time a sock was ever transported across the void to their world. They know the name of the man in our world who lost the very first human sock to them. And that man is somewhat famous in a nebulous sort of way over there.

Much of what we do is inexplicable to them. Much of what they do is inexplicable to us. Some day we will devise a way to communicate with them, but we may save them a lot of grief if we don't. Humans have a way of screwing up “first contact” really badly. Which is why all truly intelligent aliens — amongst us or out in space — try to keep their distance and maintain a low profile.

Not long after the egg phase, I got the idea in my head that I should commit acts of random generosity. I should do good deeds. If possible, I should do them without anyone knowing that I was doing them. My “victims” would be people who were down and out, especially losers.

I made the mistake of discussing this with my sister while her friend Jake was over.

“You want to do what?” Jake asked, tugging at his earring.

“I told you my brother was weird,” Lilly said.

“We live in a very predictable world where people tend to look out for number one. I want to mess with that.”

“But why would you want to do something nice for other people?” Jake asked. “Everything sucks. It's a well-known fact. Life is about trying to get away with stuff. That's why we are here. It's like a game that has certain rules. You're messing with the rules.”

“I know. That's the point.”

Lilly tried to defend me. “He's seeing a shrink.”

“His name is Dave,” I added.

“Dave told my kid brother he should smoke.”

“He's a wise man,” Jake said approvingly.

I hung my head, feeling a certain amount of shame. “It didn't work out. I just wasn't a smoker.”

“You have to give it time,” Jake said. I could tell he genuinely felt sorry for me and my failure at smoking.

So it was Saturday and I was trying to figure a way to commit acts of random goodness. I thought of phoning Darrell to come along but I was not sure he was ready for this. It might not work out at all, so I figured I would go it alone for a while. Where to begin?

All I could think of was mowing lawns. Two doors down lived Mr. Sheldon. Gus Sheldon. He was downsized when one bank bought another bank. He ran into some personal slippage after that. Wife left him to work in a casino in Las Vegas. Then Gus settled into a job doing people's taxes at H&;R Block, but he started drinking on the job. Then came a job working nights at a Quick-Way. He drank there, too. Now he just drank at home and slept in late.