I scanned my yard, which was, as it had been when I woke up that morning, covered with grass. It was wrong that a ball could hurtle at any moment and erupt into flame. At the same time, I knew that that was precisely what I wanted to happen, what would happen next if I allowed my instincts to hold sway. To protect us all, I tucked the ball into my pocket and began a frantic shimmy up the side of the house.
The players gathered and looked down with gasps of alarm. “What are you doing?” they cried out in patently fake French accents, shaking accusatory fingers, the big brown digits of mitts well-worn from use and exposure to hundreds of hours of midday sun. I planted a foot atop an outside light, grabbed a shutter, and hoisted myself the last few feet via a gutter.
Having never set foot on my roof, I little expected it to be covered with veritable pampas of artificial turf. And a baseball diamond, molded to the contours of the house, was shimmering in the now-fading daylight. There was also a cupola, which was inaccessible from inside my house.
“Okay, boys,” I said, grabbing a glove from the pile underneath the handwritten EXTRA, and pounding my fist into it. Gingerly, I made my way to what I guessed was second base. “Let’s play ball.”
They stood around looking sheepish, staring down at my roof, which, I could see, as the squat man had indicated, was in clear need of repair in places.
“What are we waiting for?” I demanded.
Finally, one mumbled, “We don’t really know how to play.” Another chimed in, “That’s why we’re up here. So people can’t see that we’re not actually playing.”
“So what are you doing?” I asked.
The Kid, as I decided I would call the eighteen-year-old, led me over to the far side of the roof, the side I hadn’t been able to see. To my shock, there were animals in cages — pigeons, a lemur, a raccoon with a clear case of alpacatitis of the testes. What I had mistaken for an umpire was in fact a squirrel. There were also video screens showing nature documentaries from the 1970s, the kind with voice-overs and saccharine music, muted. There were two buckets. One, filled with peanuts and Crackerjacks, said Positive Reinforcement. The one next to it, labeled Negative Reinforcement, teemed with a leech-cauliflower salad.
“We’re scientists,” admitted someone wearing a badge that read Pitcher/Spokesperson. “We’re conducting an experiment.” On careful inspection, I could see that the word running down his pinstriped uniform was Scientists, not Gendarmes.
“And the nature of your experiment?” I asked.
“We’re trying to teach animals to grasp the concept of extinction,” said Pitcher/Spokesperson. “We’re tired of having to bail out endangered species. It’s high time they learned individual responsibility.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. Their intent was benign, if not downright noble. I was used to scientists who just wanted to advance knowledge for its own sake, a cause I despised and attempted to undermine whenever possible. This, however, was worthy. It would mean less work for my grandchildren, who, while purely hypothetical right now, were likely to inherit nothing and, I was certain, bearing even a handful of my genes, would require decades for soul-searching instead of worrying about the environment and such.
Then it occurred to me. “Maybe they can be coaxed into playing our national pastime.”
The team members looked at one another in confusion. “America’s pastime,” I said, realizing that some were still half-pretending to be Gendarmes. Lips curled as they strained to read one another’s reactions to see if it was okay to embrace this idea.
“What better way to teach individual responsibility than that?” I said, grabbing a bat and carefully releasing the latch on the lemur cage. I explicated the sacrifice bunt, which I figured the animals, or, as I dubbed them, “the rookies,” would be doing a lot of, at least till I could instill in them the importance of off-season conditioning. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had a thing or two to learn from them, too.
A Box of One’s Own
Aguy started carrying a box around the neighborhood one day. Not a small box, the type swaddled in clear tape and addressed with scented marker; no, this was a great strapping thing, cardboard limbs flailing akimbo from a cardboard torso, defying its carrier to heft it without tripping or colliding with a wall. It was like the guy was about to give birth, unable to see his own feet, while also blindfolded. I’d seen the pregnant prancing in maternity blindfolds before, and it made me nervous, it made me cringe, I tell you.
After seeing him parading around like this up and down the sidewalks for a week or so, I confronted him. “Hey, buddy, so what’s in the box?” I figured he’d already been spoken to; I figured he’d have a set answer by now, maybe three if he was smart.
A snarl. “Do you really care?” It was the box that spoke. The man wielding the box kept going, his trajectory not unlike that of a rickshaw operator with dementia. I followed a half step behind, like a piece of toilet paper stuck to his foot. As I thought this, I looked down — sure enough, a piece of toilet paper was affixed to my foot. I removed it, deploying a forceps with a special toilet-paper-from-foot-removal accoutrement, which took a mere half hour to assemble and but a half hour to disassemble, and thoroughly eradicated the least trace of the toilet paper in only fifteen minutes. It didn’t just yank it off — nay, it vaporized it and scorched the bottom of my shoe, too, applying with a gleeful flourish a gloss that would ensure that future toilet paper scraps would think quadrice before attempting to stow away from bathroom tile onto my sole.
I spotted Box Man coming up the landfill feature known locally as “the Molehill,” comprised of tens of thousands of moles that had been surgically excised from their source — cheeks and derrières. Those who desired to graft a mole onto their visages knew they could always rely on this reservoir of protuberances, as well.
Now I was ready for him. “I do care,” I pleaded as he got close. “I really, really do.”
The box sputtered but then responded as instantaneously as though our conversation had been continuous.
“What is it that you think you care about, exactly?”
“I do not think I care. Yes, I think. And I care. But notwithstanding your skepticism, I do not think and care in a single semantic swoop.”
“Harumph,” said the box. “You’re the last person who would know what you care about. And, in any case, I can almost guarantee that you do not care about what is in me. What you do care about is seeing what you can’t immediately see, what’s concealed from your vantage point. As soon as you see what’s inside me, you’ll cease to care and will wish to discard me like any piece of cardboard that isn’t ruggedly constructed with such Euclidean virility as myself.” With this, it began to do the box equivalent of flexing, bending its flaps, making its corrugations ripple outward.
“How do you know if you won’t show me?”
“I will not relent,” said the box. “Narrative structure would dictate a gradual withering away of my defenses and a climactic divulgence of the contents of my secret interiority. But I know all about narrative structure. So don’t even try it, buddy.”
I had started out being intrigued by the man behind the box. I felt I’d been distracted by the box itself. If only I could pry it away from the hands that bore it around, slice through it with an X-Acto knife or set it aflame just long enough to out the box bearer. I checked the forceps I’d used earlier, but I hadn’t splurged for the flamethrower or any Deluxe Features at all, having been down on my luck at the time due to the legal fees expended in settling a court case with a maimed courtesan.