Читать книгу Shoulder the Sky - Lesley Choyce - Страница 10

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.