by David Klass
I shrug. School is over. This is the last interrogation I will have to face. As soon as she allows me to leave, I’ll be out the door and down the block. I’ll wibble the spaceship every hour till they return. Soon the pain and humiliation of being stuffed naked into a garbage can will be a distant memory as I zoom homeward at a thousand light-years per second.
“I read your short stories,” she says. “I understand your sister posted them on the Net without your permission. That was mean of her.” She waits. “Is there anything you want to tell me about them?”
“They weren’t short stories,” I finally respond. “They were letters.”
“Whatever they were, I have to ask you some questions about them. I know this isn’t the first time you’ve been bullied. Right?”
I count the dust streaks on her window. It should be washed more regularly.
“It would only be natural to try to hit back at people who hurt you.”
“Not for me,” I tell her truthfully. I am a peaceful member of a four-million-year-old civilization. Sandoval was a founding member of the Galactic Confederation and helped write pacifism into its charter.
“You wrote about some kind of death ray.” She glances down at her notes. “A Gagnerian Death Ray.” She gives me a little smile. “It sounds ominous. You don’t actually have one?”
I hold out my open palms for inspection. “No death rays. None in my pockets. None up my sleeves.”
“Ever thought of trying to get one?”
“Never.”
She hesitates a long beat. She is a kind woman and she knows her next question may hurt me. Finally she asks, “How about up on your spaceship?”
Her little office suddenly feels cold. I open my mouth to answer and then close it again.
“That’s the whole point of your mission, isn’t it?” she probes softly. “To evaluate, and if we don’t measure up, to destroy? I agree with a lot of what you wrote. The human race can be very ugly. I see it every day in this office. There is a lot of pain. We are destroying our planet and another race might well do better. Are you really tempted to take that decision into your own hands?”
I look back into her large and compassionate brown eyes and whisper, “Miss Schroeder, you don’t have to worry about me.”
“I’m not worried about you,” she says. “I’m worried for you.” She leans forward and asks gently, “Tom, do you know what an empowerment fantasy is?”
I shiver even though sunlight is streaming through the dusty window. “I’m not sure.”
She should not be doing this to me. She is an evaluator, not a torturer. Her job is to listen, not to eviscerate. Apparently, even the kindest Earthlings have the urge to destroy. I know who I am, thank you very much. Ketchvar III, GC Evaluator, from the Chigaboid Quadrant. And who are you, madam, to question me this way? A member of a species that the entire galaxy finds hilarious.
“Sometimes when we’re threatened, we make up a little story about ourselves that makes us feel better and safer and stronger,” she explains. “There’s nothing wrong with that. As long as we know deep down that it’s just a story.”
I glance down at my track shoes. There is mud on the sides from my visit to the turtle pond. I move my head without looking up. I am not nodding to acknowledge that she is right. My eyes are just following the pattern of mud on the shoes.
“You have a very rich imagination,” she continues. “That’s a marvelous thing. I know those letters you wrote were not supposed to be shown to anyone. You have a right to write anything you want in private. A favorite writer of mine, Kafka, wrote a famous story about being turned into a cockroach. We’re talking about stories, right?”
“Yes,” I whisper back. “Just stories. Can I go now?”
“I think we should talk regularly,” she says. “If you ever feel like you’re going to hurt yourself or anyone else, you have to come to me right away. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She holds out her hand and smiles. “Promise?”
We shake. “I promise.”
27
Behold, the end of the end, the last of their kind,” Mr.
Stringfellow says. He is manipulating the controls of an old slide projector.
I do not want to be in this room. The only reason I am here is that Miss Schroeder insisted on walking me down to this club after we left her office. “I think it’s terrific that you joined,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”
She escorted me right to the door and watched me enter. So now I am sitting here with Fruit Bat and Tree Boy, trapped in Mr. Stringfellow’s apocalyptic slide show.
On the screen, I see a small sandy-colored bird with orange legs and a black ring around the base of its neck. “Piping plovers. Cute, aren’t they?” the old science teacher asks. “When the chicks walk, they look like little windup toys. There used to be millions of them up and down the Atlantic coast.” He pauses to suck in a breath of oxygen. “Then their feathers became popular in hats. Now we’re down to fewer than two thousand pairs. Soon they’ll be gone.”
Everyone is focused on the screen. I would like to be gone from this club meeting. I wonder if I could sneak out the door. Unfortunately it is in the front of the room and Mr. Stringfellow keeps it closed.
A new slide clicks on. “The northern bog turtle,” he says, smiling as if recognizing an amusing old friend. “Four inches long. Distinctive orange and yellow blotches on either side of its head. A slow walker, also slow to reproduce, and highly sensitive to the slightest changes in its environment. Unfortunately, the places it likes to live are places that people have decided to drain and move into. Cat Girl and Fruit Bat, keep a sharp eye out for bog turtles in the Swamouth Swamp. If you see one, photograph it but don’t pick it up. One of the most powerful tools we have to stop overdevelopment is to show that an endangered species lives right in our midst.”
Hello, I am right in your midst, I am thinking. I was just stuffed into a garbage can. Put me up on the screen, Mr. Stringfellow. I am far more threatened than the piping plover or the bog turtle.
There are still four thousand piping plovers but I am, in fact, the only one of my kind on Planet Earth. My spaceship is far away. My human host is rebelling. My neighbor hates me because I went for tongue action. My father is missing, somewhere in the red ooze a million light-years away. And my sanity has just been questioned. Much as I am sympathetic to the plight of piping coastal birds and bog turtles, right now I can only think about Ketchvar III.
“Let’s turn to a lovely little fish,” Stringfellow says, clicking a new slide on the screen. “The brown speckled mucker.”
I stare at it and feel a jolt of surprise and recognition. I have seen this creature before!
“Three inches long. With sequinlike scales on its belly. Once plentiful in the rivers and streams of New Jersey. Now extremely threatened.”
I recall my bike trip to the banks of the Hoosaguchee. Just before I went on my Flindarian Lapse, I spotted a fish much like this one. I remember that as it swam in the water, its stomach flashed a beam of light at me. That must have been the sequinlike scales.
But even if this is true, I do not care today. My elbows are raw where skin was rubbed off when I was stuffed into the garbage can. I feel unmoored. Cut loose. My anxiety level is spiking. Sweat is beading across my forehead. I need to get out the door.
Mr. Stringfellow turns the lights on. He is also looking rather endangered. Now that the lights are on, I see that he is trembling more than usual, and his face has a waxlike pallor. “End of slide show, time for progress reports,” he rasps. “Ralph and Green Boy, how’s it going in Beaverdale Park?”
The thin boy who favors the color green says, “We got a map of the park. We’ve divided it up into four zones: the meadow, the ball fields, the turtle pond, and the forest. We’re concentrating on the forest, counting up the old-growth trees, checking their condition.”
“We’re climbing them,” Ralph adds. “Some of them are really hard to get up
because the branches are so high.”
“Persevere,” Mr. Stringfellow says. “A tree census is a good first step. Cat Girl and Fruit Bat, what of the swamp?”
“We’ve made a list of the animals and insects we’ve seen there,” Sue Ellen says. “There were a few really pretty butterflies. And we did see some cats.”
“They looked wild and hungry,” Fruit Bat adds.
“Beware the feral cat,” Mr. Stringfellow advises. Then he turns to me. “What’s happening in the Hoosaguchee River these days?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
He looks disappointed. “You and your friend from the orchestra haven’t visited yet?”
“She’s not my friend,” I mutter. “She’s not part of this club.” I don’t add that I’m positive Michelle will never come to a club meeting again, or any activity that I’m associated with.
Ralph and Tree Boy must have read my letters on the Internet. One of them makes a kissing sound and the other one laughs.
“You could start the project on your own,” Mr. Stringfellow suggests.
I am starting to hyperventilate. My chest feels tight, as if my shirt is shrinking around my body, slowly constricting me like a snake. I need to get out of this school with its stinky garbage cans and its torturing therapists and its nutty old science teachers. I need to be free to try to contact my spaceship. I want to go home, to my safe and normal world. “I have a lot of other things going on right now,” I tell him.
“It’s easy to be distracted,” he agrees. “That’s why we must redouble our efforts here. We must make saving the earth our number one priority.”
“I can’t do that.” I stand up.
Mr. Stringfellow moves between the door and me. “Why not?” His waxy face is challenging. His eyes bore into mine.
Get out of my way, Earthling. Your single-minded cause is not my cause. Your blighted planet is not my planet. Sandoval is pristine. Now let me go! “Because right now I need to take care of myself,” I tell him.
“We all have our problems. I have a few of my own these days.” He coughs and sucks oxygen. “Here’s the deal. If I give a damn, you have to give a damn. The mark of a man is how he triumphs over his personal problems to accomplish something that is truly important.”
I look back at him. The mark of a GC evaluator is that he accurately reads a situation and reports back on what should be done. “I respect you, but you are wrong. It is not my earth and I do not need to make my mark as a man.”
“What the heck does that mean?” he asks.
Someone whispers, “Alien.” I think it’s Sue Ellen.
I try to get around Mr. Stringfellow. He is slow and connected to an oxygen canister but somehow he cuts me off.
“Stay,” he says. “I can tell you belong here.”
“You know nothing about me. We have less in common than an elephant and a sea sponge. Get out of my way. I just want to go home.”
He reaches out a trembling hand to try to stop me, but I push around him. For a moment I’m afraid he may fall over, but he manages to grab the metal rod that juts up from his oxygen tank.
I yank the door open. Just as I’m leaving I hear him say, “Fool. Don’t you know you are home?”
28
A day of fear gives way to a night of anxiety.
I am trying very hard not to think about something. It keeps circling back toward me, like a creature in a nightmare. I have shut it up in the back closet in the most remote corner of Tom Filber’s mind. But the human brain is not good at locking nagging worries away. I can hear its wings fluttering against the closet door. I try to forget about it by focusing on my other problems.
I have still not received any message from the Preceptor. Did something happen to the spaceship? Could an asteroid have struck it? Such accidents do occur, even to the most sophisticated interstellar craft.
I try three times to throw my mind skyward in a Flindarian Lapse to search for the spaceship and check on my father, but I cannot achieve separation. In order to liberate my essence I need to wipe my mind blank. I am ashamed to admit it, but after all my years of advanced GC training, I cannot muster the discipline.
The routine of day-to-day life is supposed to distract humans from their worst fears. But the Filber home provides no relief. Everything is unsettled at 330 Beech Avenue, as if all the rules have suddenly been tossed out the window.
There is no dinner. Sally and I have to fend for ourselves. My mother is too upset about my father to cook anything. One minute she is cursing him and the next she is afraid that she may have driven him away for good. She paces from room to room. She snaps at us and then breaks off in mid-sentence. Her eyes are red and pensive.
It’s best to avoid her. I find a small bag of potato chips and eat it on the back porch, looking up at the night sky. It is a clear, dark night, and the stars spill across the heavens like gold coins that have been dumped out of a chest. The familiar constellations of the galaxy should calm me. Instead, they unsettle me.
Somewhere up there my father has either emerged from the ooze or been declared dead. I have no way of contacting him or finding out about his condition.
I have wrapped the sugar doughnut with my wibbler in tinfoil. I keep it near me at all times. Occasionally I whisper into it, “Come in. This is Ketchvar. Can anyone read me?”
Then I wait. The only reply I get is the buzz of night insects from our backyard.
The thing I am trying not to think about is, in its own way, even more distressing than my father’s predicament, or the spaceship’s absence. Now that I am on the back porch, alone, I am tempted to release it from the closet and take it on. I recall Mr. Stringfellow’s last words to me, as I fled his club: “Fool. Don’t you know you are home?”
No, I tell myself, keep the closet locked.
Tom Filber is enjoying my predicament. His disembodied voice filters out of the Ragwellian Bubble and mocks me. So you wanted to be human? This is what you get for stealing my body, you gastropod geek. Being a fourteen-year-old is no day at the beach. You’ve messed everything up, and it’s only going to get worse. Michelle hates your guts. The kids in school threw you out like garbage. Why don’t you go back to Sandoval and let me try to pick up the pieces? Oh yeah, I forgot, your ride left without you. Tough luck. You’re just as trapped as I am!
You cannot talk to me that way, I tell him. You have no willpower.
I have plenty of willpower. I’m going to find a way out of here and take back what’s mine.
One more word out of you and I will move you from the parietal lobe to the colon, I threaten him. Be silent!
“Are you talking to me?” my mother asks. She has walked onto the porch.
“No,” I tell her. “I was talking to the insects. They make so much noise I can’t think.”
“That’s what insects do at night,” she says. Her eyes move to the bag of potato chips I have almost emptied. I’m afraid she is going to yell at me for eating chips on the porch. But instead she off ers me a banana. “Here, at least eat something healthy.”
I take the banana. “Thanks.”
She stands looking off into the darkness of the backyard. She is not gazing up at the stars. She is staring at the empty driveway. My father’s old car is not there. “Where is that good-for-nothing? He wasn’t at the bar all day. None of his friends have seen him. He’s never taken off like this.”
“He will come home soon,” I tell her, repeating what Sergeant Collins said. But I am thinking, Why would he? You have driven him away with your temper and your insults. He is a good man, but he has had enough. He is probably five hundred miles away by now.
“I hope he doesn’t come back,” she says. “We’ll be better off without him in the long run.” But there is a hollowness in her voice when she says it, and I notice that her red eyes never stray for long from the empty driveway.
“The human condition is a difficult one,” I tell her. “The stresses and uncertainties are debilitating.”
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br /> She peers down at me. “You are the strangest boy. But we didn’t exactly make it easy for you.” She walks over and sits down next to me on an old sofa. “I got a call from school,” she says. “They said you’d been in some trouble.”
“It was no big deal.”
“Some kids roughed you up?”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not okay. Who was it? I’ll call their parents.”
“You will just make things worse for me.”
I am afraid she is going to insist, but instead she asks, “How’s the banana?”
“Not bad.”
She puts her right hand on my shoulder. It is the same hand she uses to swing a broom at me, so the tender gesture isn’t completely convincing. “If you want to fight your own battles, I’ll let you fight them.”
“I am not a fighter,” I tell her. “I believe in peace.” It is the guiding principle of the civilized universe. It has led Sandoval to millions of years of happiness and prosperity.
“Peace will not protect you,” she says.
“It has more power than you know.”
She looks back at me. “Sometimes it’s scary how much you remind me of your father when he was young. There was a time when I actually believed his silliness.”
I look up at the constellations and say softly, “You can believe this. There are wonderful things out there that you know nothing about.”
Her hand grips my shoulder harder. “Tom, listen to me. If I’ve learned anything from slaving away for fifteen years in a greasy diner and raising two kids on next to nothing, it’s that you can’t run away and hide,” she says. “You can’t pretend some wonderful bolt from the blue is suddenly going to strike that will turn everything around. That’s a fool’s escape.” She glances at the empty driveway and her face hardens. “Be a man and face the facts. It’s an ugly world but you have to take it for what it is. If you look for an easy way out in a pipe dream or an empty beer glass, you’ll only be making it worse for yourself and those who love you.”
