by David Klass
I spit and gag.
“You don’t like dirt? Try some grass. I better see you swallow it!”
I lower my head again, bite off a blade of a monocotyledonous green plant in the family Gramineae, and chew on it.
“Look, he’s doing it!” one of the young onlookers calls out delightedly.
“Maybe he’ll give milk next,” somebody else suggests, and laughs ring out.
Scott gets up off me and rubs his hands together, as if scraping off dust after a job. Then he looks around at the circle of kids. “Anybody says anything about this at school, it’s their turn next,” he warns. He points a finger at one boy whose face is scarred with the lesions and cysts of acne vulgaris, a skin condition that often affects young humans. “You understand that, Zitface?”
The boy called Zitface’s eyes are gleaming with excitement, and I can tell he enjoyed watching the beating. “I didn’t see anything,” Zitface says. “I wasn’t even here.”
8
I lie there, unmoving, till I am sure Scott is far away. Then
I spit out the grass and take an inventory of my body. I am sore where he punched me, but no bones are broken.
Still, I have had enough. Much more than enough. No Sandovinian has been treated this way in all of recorded history. I have just been victimized by a “bully”—an overly aggressive young Earthling who attempts to conceal his own weakness and insecurities by picking on those he deems even more vulnerable. I remember the feel of the Earthling bully on top of me, pinning me down. I vividly recall the bloodthirsty faces of the crowd, urging him on to inflict greater pain. And I will not soon forget being forced to eat dirt.
I am a Level-Five GC Evaluator, trained to be sympathetic to new forms of behavior and to endure cultural surprises. But even I have my limits!
To hell with the human race. They do not deserve this green grass that they force each other to eat. They do not deserve the blue skies whose atmosphere they are sullying, or the lovely oceans they are befouling. And they certainly do not deserve this last fair chance that I and the GC were striving to give them.
I will text-message my spaceship and notify the Preceptors that the decision was an unexpectedly easy one: Destroy species Homo sapiens, and good riddance to them!
“Tom?” A kind, caring voice reaches out to me.
Give their lush planet to the Lugonians! One pulse of a carefully calibrated Gagnerian Death Ray will do the trick from Arctic to Antarctic!
“Tom, are you okay? Who are the Lugonians?”
A soft hand reaches down and brushes some gravel off my chin.
I look up into two bright blue eyes, bluer and deeper than the sky overhead. “No,” I tell her, “I said it feels like I got hit with a sack of onions.”
“Quit staring at me like that!”
“Like what?”
“Get this straight. I’m just doing this because I feel sorry for you and you happen to be my neighbor. Are you bleeding?”
I shake my head. So this is Michelle Peabody.
She has silky blond hair that moves in the breeze. Remarkably, even as I lie beaten and bruised and condemning the entire species, I feel a sharp spike of human testosterone. It is in fact a stronger chemical than I thought, but I easily vanquish it. “Thank you for your concern,” I tell her. “I will be okay.”
“No, you won’t. Tom, sit up. Listen to me. You can’t let Scott do that to you. Why don’t you fight back?”
“He’s stronger than I am.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you fight back, he’ll stop bullying you.”
“Or he might kill me.”
“I just don’t get what’s wrong with you,” she says. She glances quickly at her watch. “Uh-oh! Five minutes to get to school. Come on!”
9
To be, or not to be,” Mrs. Hilderlee enthuses, jabbing a finger at us. “To be, or not to be! It is the single most famous line ever written in the English language. What do you think Shakespeare was trying to say to us?”
I am sitting in fourth-period English with twenty of my classmates, including my tormentor, Scott, his peon, Zitface, and lovely Michelle Peabody, in a trailer that has been converted to a classroom. Winthrop P. Muller High School is apparently too small to accommodate all the offspring of the testosterone-fueled citizens of the town of Barrisford, so they have expanded into old trailers in the parking lot.
“Hey, Alien,” Zitface whispers. “To be or not to be dead meat in gym class? I think to be.”
I ignore him. I am busy trying to unravel the great mystery of “school.” It is clearly more complicated than mere voluntary incarceration. Now that I have spent a night with the Filber family, I have some new insights into this puzzling institution. I believe the real premise behind “school” has to do with the fact that Planet Earth is very beautiful, and there are many pleasant things to do on it. But the reality is that most of the students in Barrisford will never get to do any of those things.
They will not visit beautiful places. They will not think deep thoughts and have exciting adventures. Their jobs will be tedious and they will come home at the end of each day consumed by fury like my mother or trying to put their brains to sleep like my dad.
Scott grins at me. “How did you like your breakfast?”
“Excuse me. I am listening to our teacher.”
“Plenty more where that came from, Alien. I’m not finished with you yet.”
Mrs. Hilderlee must be a bit deaf, because she does not hear the class bully’s threats. She is standing by the trailer’s lone window with a faraway look on her face. I believe she has taught this same lesson so many times that she is capable of doing it completely on autopilot. “I want everyone to write down five ‘To be, or not to be’ moments from your own lives,” she says. “If Shakespeare could do it, you can, too.”
The students around me groan and grimace.
“If Shakespeare was here, I’d kick him in the gonads,” Scott mutters.
All around me kids chew gum, pass notes, and steal glances at the large clock on the wall. No one writes anything.
Scott whispers something to Michelle Peabody. I hear the words “movie” and “hang out.” She blushes and shakes her head. “I told you no a hundred times.”
“Don’t be a tease,” he whispers back. “You know you like me.”
I try to ignore this, and concentrate on my mission. I have only been to three classes on this, my first day at school, but I have already seen enough to begin forming a new hypothesis. My new theory is that school serves the purpose of narrowing the horizons of young Homo sapiens and conditioning them to accept mediocrity as their birthright and drudgery as their lot. The teachers accomplish this by taking the most beautiful creations of the human mind, and the sharpest insights by human thinkers in a variety of fields, and boiling them down to a nonsensical pabulum that they feed to their students year after year till the children of Barrisford are convinced that there is nothing out there worth striving for.
By the time Scott, Zitface, and Michelle Peabody graduate, Winthrop P. Muller High School will have accomplished its mission and they will have stopped reading great books, caring about the brilliant insights of deep thinkers, and dreaming their own dreams. Their brains will have been dulled and their ambitions dampened, and they will be ready to shoulder the burden of a lifetime of hard work with few rewards.
Mrs. Hilderlee is, I believe, attempting to speed this process along right now by reducing Shakespeare’s most famous play to sheer drivel. “To be, or not to be?” she repeats, gazing out the trailer’s single gritty window. “To speak in class, or not to speak in class? Who is ready to share with us?”
She waits with an expectant smile planted on her face, but no one seems inclined to share this morning. “I need a volunteer,” she says. “Otherwise I’ll have to call on someone.”
“Alien, raise your hand,” Scott commands.
“But I don’t have anything to say,” I whisper back. “I am here to observe and
learn.”
“Raise your hand right now or I’ll rip your arm out of its socket in gym class.”
From my detailed knowledge of human anatomy, I can project that having my arm ripped from my socket would produce excruciating pain. I glance at Scott and he makes a violent ripping motion in the air. I hesitate a second more and reluctantly raise my hand.
“Thomas? Do you have a ‘To be, or not to be’ moment that we can all enjoy?”
“No,” I tell her. “But I do have a question.”
She looks startled. “Go on.”
I glance at Scott and Zitface, and then back at her. “Do you think that the whole human race may hit a ‘To be, or not to be’ moment relatively soon?”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” she says. “Why would we?”
I wish I could tell her that at this very moment a GC spaceship is orbiting Earth with a Gagnerian Death Ray on board. But of course that is not information I can reveal.
“Keep talking, Alien,” Zitface hisses. “Just a few more minutes and we’re free.”
“My question is this,” I tell her. “We are destroying our beautiful planet. We are building weapons of mass destruction. We are cruel to our fellow humans, and even nastier to our animal and fish neighbors. Doesn’t it seem to you that, as a species, we may soon be facing a ‘To be, or not to be’ moment? We may destroy ourselves, or someone with greater power and wisdom may decide to put us out of our misery?”
Mrs. Hilderlee looks back at me, opens her mouth, and closes it again. “That is a very worrying suggestion,” she finally says as the bell rings.
10
Today in biology we are going to do a dissection,” Mr.
Karnovsky announces. “If you need to throw up, I have put a purple pail right over there, by the window. If you miss the pail, you will have to clean it up.”
“Cool! Are we going to dissect human corpses?” Scott asks, picking up a small dissecting knife and waving it about like a sword.
“Put down that knife before I call the security guard,” Mr. Karnovsky orders. “There will be no human corpses today.”
“How about a cat or a dog?” Zitface asks.
“We will work our way from simple organisms to more complex ones,” Mr. Karnovsky informs him. “In that way our dissection experiences will give us a chance to appreciate how evolution leads to modification and complexity. We’ve talked about the theories of Charles Darwin.”
A girl with frizzy red hair raises her hand. “Do we have to do this?”
“Of course,” Mr. Karnovsky says. “It’s mandatory.”
“What if it’s against my religion?”
“Why don’t you just throw up right now and get it over with, Sue Ellen?” Zitface suggests.
“I will for sure if I look at you,” she says back.
Some people laugh. Zitface does not like that. He is, apparently, quite sensitive about his appearance. “Watch out, freaky-haired bitch.”
“What are you gonna do? Infect me with your zits?”
He kicks her chair so hard her head snaps back. “How do you like that?”
“Touch me again and my brother will kick your ass,” she hisses.
I listen to the insults and threats flying back and forth between my classmates and try to figure out why they hate each other. It is a question at the very heart of my secret mission.
The Council of Elders stipulated three criteria that I must use in deciding whether the human race is worth preserving. First, I must determine whether the violent and cruel behavior manifested by adult humans is innate or acquired. As I sit listening to Sue Ellen and Zitface trade threats and insults, I recall the bloodthirsty faces of the youngest members of the crowd that witnessed my beating this morning.
The kid who tripped me couldn’t have been more than ten. My strong impression so far is that humans are as mean at five as they are at fifty.
Mr. Karnovsky shouts, “ENOUGH! SHUT UP!” and points to a sheet tacked to the bulletin board. “I’ve posted your lab partner assignments,” he says. “Now, behave for just a moment. I’m going to get today’s dissection cadavers.” He ducks into an adjacent supply room, and the kids cluster around the bulletin board.
“No way I’m working with the Alien!” Zitface announces. He looks around and focuses on a thin boy who has a set of colored pens. “Peterson, you’re switching with me.”
Peterson shakes his head. “No way. I’m not working with the Alien.”
“Did I give you a choice?”
“Did I give anyone a choice?” Mr. Karnovsky asks, returning to the room with two bulging sacks. Presumably whatever we are going to dissect is in those sacks. I notice that my classmates are suddenly fixated on them, trying to guess what it might be from the bumps and lumps.
“They’re rats.”
“No way, turtles.”
“Snakes.”
“Guinea pigs.”
“Frogs.”
Mr. Karnovsky pulls on some rubber gloves and a plastic face mask. “Before we embark on our journey of experimental inquiry, let us pause for an observation from the brilliant mind of Charles Darwin,” he says.
He opens a well-thumbed book and begins to read in a monotone. “ ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ “
My classmates are eager to begin dissecting and couldn’t care less about the insights of Charles Darwin. But I try to ignore their jokes and spitballs and listen to Mr. Karnovsky’s reading selection.
The second criterion that the Council stipulated I should use in deciding the fate of the human race is their capacity—or lack thereof—to create beauty or make original contributions to galactic knowledge. It would be uncivilized for the GC to destroy a species capable of profound aesthetic expression or scientific insight.
So far, in my humble estimation, Homo sapiens do not qualify on either count. William Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” did not make too much of an impression on me. Now I listen to Mr. Karnovsky reading about Darwin and evolution, and how glorious it is that human beings are the highest animals. Meanwhile, Zitface is running through his repertoire of bathroom noises and Scott is making flushing sounds at appropriate intervals.
If this is the best the human race can do, the galaxy will surely not lose anything by eliminating them.
For just a moment, my eyes drift and meet the blue eyes of Michelle Peabody. She quickly looks up at the ceiling, as if counting the tiles there.
“Okay,” Mr. Karnovsky announces, “let’s get to it! Gloves and face masks on, please. I am now slitting the specimen bag open.”
A strong, musky odor seeps out of the sack.
“OOOOHH. YUUUCK!” everyone seems to scream at once.
I actually find the aroma rather pleasant.
“It’s slice-and-dice time,” Scott calls out. “But what are they?”
“Molluscan class Gastropoda,” Mr. Karnovsky tells us.
I immediately feel dizzy and almost topple to the floor. No. Please. Not that.
“We will begin with the muscular foot, which is lubricated with mucus for locomotion.”
“No way I’m touching mucus!” a girl cries out.
“We will slit the body upward till we reach the front two antennae, also known as the eyestalks, where we will tweezer off the eyes,” Mr. Karnovsky explains.
I am holding my stomach with both hands.
He picks the bag up by the bottom and tips it over.
“WORMS!” kids call out, guessing incorrectly. “GRUBS! WEEVILS!”
“No, slugs,” Mr. Karnovsky corrects them. “Snails without shells.”
I cannot stop myself from pointing out in a weak voice, “But they’re still alive.”
“Not a problem,” Mr. Karnovsky notes. “We will start by pinning them to t
he dissection boards like this.”
I watch his long pin descend toward what could well be my distant cousin. I try to control my reaction. I am, after all, on a secret mission. But I don’t even make it to the purple pail by the window.
“Hey, LOOK!” Scott shouts out gleefully. “THE ALIEN IS BLOWING FLAGRANT CHOW ALL OVER MICHELLE’S SHOES!”
I am crouching down, retching uncontrollably. Poor Michelle Peabody is pinned between two desks, with no way to escape. I look up for a second into her horrified blue eyes and try to stammer out an apology. “I’m sorry. I can’t . . .” Then another wave of nausea sweeps over me and my stomach seems to open up and void itself.
Michelle screams in horror, “STOP IT, YOU ALIEN!”
11
What happened to you in biology today could happen to anyone,” the young woman in the green sweater says. She flashes me a confiding smile. “I always hated dissecting things. Frogs. Mice. Even snails.”
We are in a small, bright office that looks down on ball fields. Kids are playing soccer below us. I see white netting blowing in the autumn wind.
“Snails deserve respect, too,” I tell her.
She nods thoughtfully. “You’re right, snails are living creatures. You’re a very sensitive boy, Tom. That’s a good thing. But it can also be painful.”
Miss Schroeder is the psychologist at Winthrop P. Muller High School, which means she is an evaluator of kids with problems. Little does she know she is sitting across from a Level-Five GC Evaluator charged with deciding the fate of the human race! “We heard an unconfirmed report that there was some trouble this morning on the way to school,” she tells me, watching my face carefully. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
I am tempted to describe being forced to eat grass. But I recall Scott’s warning to the circle of kids. I must obey the conventions of male adolescents.
I access the consciousness of Tom Filber. Should I tell her? I ask him.
His response comes back loud and clear from the Ragwellian Bubble: If you squeal, you’re toast.
I give Miss Schroeder a shrug. “I appreciate your concern. It was nothing of great consequence.”
