Shoulder the Sky. Lesley Choyce
apathy. He almost lost his cookies until he realized I was messing with his head.
“Good one, dude,” he said, finally taking a breath. “Physician heal thyself. Right on.” Then he tightened the rubber band on his little ponytail and we continued talking about me and my problem of acting so normal.
Disappointment with my short-lived smoking career sent me back to a traditional cafeteria lunch with Darrell. Darrell was a loner like me, and when two loners go separate paths, well, you just have two individual loners instead of two loners who hang out together.
“I felt forsaken,” Darrell said. I know that doesn’t sound like anything a kid would say, but neither Darrell nor I have ever spoken in the same manner as our contemporaries. This is why sometimes we were referred to as “intellectual snot” — or “snots” if we were being referred to in the plural.
“It was just an experiment,” I said.
Darrell understood all about experiments. “How’d it turn out?”
“I had high expectations, but it didn’t make orbit.”
“Been there, done that. Got the T-shirt for it.”
We liked to mix idioms. In fact, we liked the word “idiom” a lot and fantasized starting a band called the Idiom Idiots, just Darrell and me and about a hundred thousand dollars worth of computerized music and sound gear.
While I’d been trying to learn how to smoke, Darrell had been up to his own experiments. I noticed he was wolfing down a tuna sandwich: whole wheat, heavy mayonnaise, sliced pickles protruding from the edges. “Martino, I thought long and hard about your alliance with coffin nails and came to the conclusion that I too need some way to break out of this shell I’ve created for myself.”
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.
CHAPTER SIX
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