Shoulder the Sky

by Lesley Choyce

  Stuff

  The Great Pyramid is aligned almost perfectly north-south and east-west. The guys who lined it up that way took their directions from the stars. The limestone blocks were cut from cliffs with copper saws and dragged to their destination. Most of the damn thing is granite, though, and somebody had to chip away at it with tools made of harder rocks.

  The granite blocks weighed about fifty tons each and it took two million of them to make the whole structure. The blocks were dragged along on a kind of causeway affair. They say 170 men could haul one block. There would be a guy or a whole bunch of guys with pitchers of some kind of greasy stuff that would lubricate the track ahead to make things at least a little bit easier. Then the stones had to be shoved up a ramp and put into place.

  The story goes that everyone was really proud of their hard-ass jobs — the block chippers, the draggers, the guys with the pitchers full of whatever pouring slimy goo to create a monument. They worked their hands to the bone and some got crushed along the way and some got really messed-up backs. A bunch of them got bit by snakes in the Nile. Some probably got depressed because they didn’t believe it was all worthwhile.

  It was probably better than wasting your time watching television, I’ll admit, but it was like another mistake of history, a monumental waste of time.

  Herodotus, who came along a mere two thousand years later, wrote about this big stone bozo of a building in the ancient city of Cheops. He did some research and learned about the male slaves who did most of the work. And where were the women? you might wonder. How come they didn’t have to help drag rocks? Answer — because the slaves thought it was an honour to do the labour. Go figure. Anyway, Herodotus somehow determined what the Egyptian hackers, haulers, and greasers were eating: radishes, onions, and garlic. One whole shit-load of vegetarian food.

  A hundred thousand men worked over twenty years to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

  I’m thinking that H. must have left out some of the vittles consumed on the job. Maybe they used papyrus to make garlic and radish sandwiches or something. No mayo in those days, for sure. So you have a work crew of 170 very proud, shirtless Egyptians taking lunch break and it’s as hot as the planet Venus. They chow down on their veggies and discuss how cool it is to be hauling big-ass rocks to make a tomb monument for whatever pharaoh it was. (Sorry, I can’t quite remember his name, which shows you how well big rock edifices work to preserve the memory of despots.)

  After lunch when they got back to shoving their prize 50,000 pounder, can you imagine the level of flatulence amongst the boys? A veritable cloud of radish, onion, and garlic farts surely must have been downright visible hovering over the scene. But there would be no vampires for sure. They didn’t have any problem whatsoever with vampires in those days.

  And whenever you mention pyramids, someone starts thinking aliens were involved. Like this makes a lot of sense — you invent faster-than-light-speed travel, take your shuttle to a distant planet named Earth, and then help a bunch of vegetarians move rocks that are way too big for them to be messing with in the first place. I think not.

  And if these aliens showed up and saw crews of 170 men shoving a stone and simultaneously farting radishonion-garlic farts, do you really think they would hang around? I mean, the Egyptians didn’t even have pulleys. They thought they were like rocket scientists because some brilliant pharaoh pleaser had suggested the work would go easier if you employed the greaser guy with the pitcher of gobs to slime up the skid.

  If the aliens showed up then, they left with ideas about better things to do.

  What history teaches us, as usual, is that most of the things people spent their lives doing were a waste of time.

  Napoleon showed up in 1798 at the pyramid in Cheops; he was trying to conquer the world at the time and somehow found himself in Egypt. He was impressed, of course, because he thought there were enough stones in the pyramid to build a stone wall around France. And of course, he loved the idea of some ruler who could boss around thousands if not millions of his citizens. (“Okay, you guys over there. Go shove big rocks for twenty years.”

  “Yes, your dignity, we’d be honoured.”)

  Today we build Wal-Marts and video stores in shopping malls that have expected life spans of twenty years. After that, they get torn down or are turned into indoor go-cart tracks.

  Emerso

  I changed my mind and went to Scott’s funeral. There were a lot of people there. Words were spoken. I wasn’t paying much attention. Kathy stood beside me by the gravesite and when she started crying, I held her hand. I felt her hand wet with tears. I was going to say something to her and rummaged in my mind for options like, It’s okay, or It’s going to be okay, or It was meant to be, or He’s at peace now. But I knew it was a much better policy to keep my mouth shut. Words that issued from my mouth often had unintended results.

  It was a very shiny polished wooden box. My guess would be mahogany or cherry. I heard someone start laughing. It was Bill, one of the smokers. Everyone turned and looked at him as his friend Finster smacked him hard on the shoulder. “Screw you,” Bill said out loud.

  People scowled and then turned back to watch as the coffin was getting lowered into the ground. I was thinking about Dave just then. Dave would be expecting me to break down here — he was still waiting for me to completely freak out about my mom. He would remind me it was okay. I needed to do this thing. But today wasn’t the day. I almost started laughing thanks to Bill. Laughing at funerals can be infectious and really pisses people off. I was still a little jealous of Scott even though he was in the box and someone was tossing in a shovelful of dirt on him.

  Kathy was crying more and had run out of Kleenexes. I almost offered her my handkerchief until I remembered that it hadn’t been washed in maybe two months. I thought about all the old dried-up snot on it and decided against it. I bet her eyes were gonna be sore after all that crying.

  A minister was saying something but no one was listening. He sounded pretty sure of himself like he knew what this was all about, but I think he was just faking it. A few people tossed flowers into the grave. Scott’s father poured some sand on top of the box — and I remembered that Scott had been a surfer. Finster and Bill walked up as people were beginning to leave and they dropped in a couple of cigarettes even though Scott had stopped smoking before his accident. Bill was probably thinking that if Scott had kept smoking, he might have stopped somewhere for a smoke and avoided getting into an accident and dying.

  Since he died young he wouldn’t ever have to be ravaged by lung cancer, so maybe he might as well have kept smoking. These are the things that go through your head when one of your classmates is being buried.

  Kathy dropped a letter into the grave. I had a pretty good idea what that was all about and for a split second considered sneaking back later to steal the letter before the grave got filled in by the professional guys who fill in graves. A couple of shovelfuls of dirt is just window dressing at the ceremony.

  I walked Kathy to the car where her mother was waiting. Her shoulders were kind of bent over and she looked at the ground. “Thanks for being with me,” she said and got in the car.

  Standing alone, I had a sudden impulse to visit my mother’s grave, an easy walk from here on the other side of the cemetery. But thinking about it made me feel numb. There was no connection between her and all this. I turned my head in that direction but felt nausea in the pit of my stomach.

  I looked around to see if Darrell had ever shown up but he hadn’t. Mr. Cohen came over to see if I was okay. (He was still very sure I was “at risk.”) “You want to go get a coffee or something?” he asked.

  “I’m off caffeine. Thanks anyway,” I said. Sitting down with well-meaning Mr. Cohen at a time like this would be like drill work at the dentist. I knew he was trying to be kind. “See you in school, Mr. Cohen.”

  “Right.”

  I saw Mr. Miller but he was hurrying off in the other direction. The crowd was almost gon
e and I started thinking about that letter Kathy had dropped on the casket. Nah, it wouldn’t be right.

  That’s when Jake appeared.

  “Kid,” he said.

  “Jake, what are you doing here?”

  “Lilly sent me to keep an eye on you.” I figured they were back together again.

  “That was thoughtful of her.”

  “I’ll walk you home.”

  I never liked Jake. He knew that. He never liked me. But then Jake didn’t like much of anything.

  “Don’t feel too bad for him.”

  “Who?”

  “Rutledge. He was a loser. Losers die young. Only the strong survive.”

  It was an honest appraisal coming from Jake. Jake had a kind of Darwinian view of people. Winners get rich and live without having to work; losers have to bust gut and never get anywhere and then die penniless. Scott Rutledge probably would have been one of those people to make some kind of incredible business deal just because he was charming and live happily ever after if it hadn’t been for the accident.

  “Are you strong?” I asked him.

  “Tough. I’m tough. Takes a lot to knock me down. Maybe you could learn a thing or two from me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You and Lilly have been through a rough time, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  “You got to be tough to take what you’ve been through,” Jake said

  “Thanks.”

  “I hate to lay this one on you now, but I think I’m going to be the one to break up with Lilly pretty soon.”

  “You shit.”

  “It’s for the best. I don’t know. The spark just isn’t there anymore. But I’ve been putting it off, you know, because of your mother and all.”

  “Jesus, Jake, you are a friggin’ humanitarian.”

  “I’m like that. Tough but kind deep down. I still like her. It’s just that I have, as you might say, been exploring other options. You’re a guy, so you understand these things. Hormones and all that. Maybe you could tell her for me.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know. You’re her brother. She thinks you’re kind of cracked but she knows you’re smart. We both think that’s part of your problem.”

  “My problem?”

  “Brainiac and all. You know. You think too much. Read too many books. Get strange ideas floating through your head.”

  For some reason, I was thinking about Napoleon looking on the Great Pyramid at Cheops. Napoleon calculating how the rocks in the pyramid would be taken apart and transported to become a fence around France. Jake was right about having strange thoughts.

  “Jake, do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “Martino, I don’t believe in much of anything. That’s my code to live by.”

  “Just suppose you and I were together in a previous life.”

  “What is this supposed to mean?”

  “Just use your imagination. What do you think you were in a previous life?”

  “I don’t know. Race car driver maybe. Movie star. A guy with like a big wad of cash — nice car, fancy house, kidney-shaped swimming pool.”

  “Wrong. In a previous life you were a dung beetle.”

  Jake stopped walking. “What the hell is a dung beetle?”

  “The dung beetle lives on the plains in East Africa. When elephants take a shit, the dung beetle collects the shit, rolls it to his hole in the ground where he lives, ands then eats it for the rest of the day.”

  Jake looked disgusted. “Dipweed. I come down here to walk you home and you tell me this. I’m hurt.”

  Meaning of Life

  Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Life consists of what man is thinking of all day.” He exempted women, it seems, from this definition. Maybe women actually do things and men just think. Life for most of us guys, according to Emerson, is a muddle of thoughts about primarily inconsequential things. Cyril Connolly spoke of us all spending “a life sentence in the dungeon of self.”

  Suppose then that you had no memory of yesterday’s thoughts. The self of yesterday would disappear and you would only be the person you woke up to be today and you’d be defined by whatever goes through your head now. That might be an improvement, although there would be continuity problems. Today’s self would at least be set free from the prison of yesterday’s self.

  Napoleon then, on his visit to Egypt, would have just leaned against the Cheops pyramid and thought it was a fine sunny day and that the rocks had a nice solid feel to them. He would have forgotten about conquering more of the world and so a whole lot of people wouldn’t have suffered needlessly.

  Emerso

  When I was a little kid I was a big fan of erasers. My mom would buy me the largest, softest eraser she could find. I wrote whole pages in pencil and then erased them until the sheet was perfectly blank again. I tried erasing newspaper stories with some success and I discovered that even the print in some books could be erased. Pen erasers were coarser and left ugly scars or even tears on the page. After a while I got the hint that some things were put down and not supposed to changed or be erased.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  School and death seemed like a natural enough combination to me but it seemed to catch others off guard. Since nothing much of any significance ever seemed to happen in the classroom, it was a shock to our system. We’d lost Scott Rutledge and all you had to do was look at the empty seat where he usually sat to feel sad. Girls cried and left biology class. Football players got sniffly and then smashed a fist into a desk and left the room too. Teachers talked about how we all needed to “pull together.”

  Mr. Cohen said we should talk about it in class but that idea was squelched. Traditional shrinks (not people like Dave) came in to talk to us as we doodled in our notebooks.

  The oddest thing of all was that Kathy Bringhurst started talking to me about sex. “What if a person dies and has never made love to someone she is in love with?”

  “Some people believe in reincarnation,” I answered matter-of-factly. I was a big fan of the idea of reincarnation but I wasn’t an outright believer. I wasn’t exactly a religious type, just someone who thought a lot about metaphysical stuff.

  “You mean that if you don’t get to do it in this life, then you will in the next?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Have you thought a lot about sex?”

  “In this life or the next?”

  “Martin, you are so weird.”

  “You and my sister could do a chorus together.”

  “But I like you. Weird can be good.”

  “Thanks. Nobody ever quite put it that way.”

  “Tell me your innermost desire,” Kathy insisted. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Please. We only have a few minutes.”

  The bell was about to ring. We were about to depart for separate classes on opposite sides of the school. Kathy was looking at me, straight in my eyes. I think she was expecting me to say something about her — like I wanted to kiss her or make love to her. I don’t know what she expected.

  I closed my eyes and said the first thing that swam up in my head. “I wish I was in Norway.” I opened my eyes to see the look on Kathy’s face. She seemed deeply hurt and started to back away from me.

  “You bastard,” she screamed, then turned and ran down the hall. Other kids were watching. I just stood there wondering why I had said what I had said. It was one of those moments of both clarity and confusion. Sure, I remembered trucks and maps. I sort of knew why I wanted to be in Norway but I didn’t know why I didn’t say something Kathy wanted to hear. She had wanted me to say something about her. Or I could have just said nothing and kissed her. It wouldn’t have been me kissing her. It would have been somebody else, but it would have been the right thing to do.

  “Martin, are you going to class or are you just going to stand there in the hall?” It was the VP.

  I started walking but I felt a kind of fog settling
on my brain. I didn’t go to class. Instead I walked to the furnace room where Declan Christmas was eating his third lunch of the day.

  Declan was one of the janitors who kept the school running. He had explained to me once that he was half Aboriginal and half Irish. Both had been hungry ancestral peoples and so he packed three lunches to get him through each day.

  “Tinny, boy. You all right?”

  Declan had a habit of renaming everyone in the school. “You use only the last syllable and then add a ‘y’ at the end. Double the consonant if you have to before the ‘y.’ So I was Tinny (not Tiny) and Darrell was Relly, not Reily (which would have been more appropriately Irish).

  The furnace room was a kind of escape pod for a number of students like me when things got screwy at school. Everyone knew this. Parents had complained, of course — there will always be parents to complain about something. This will go on until the universe collapses into itself and becomes a black hole again. Then parents will ease up.

  Declan had been accused of everything and anything. Some said he was messing around with the Grade 9 girls; some said he sold drugs (because he was part Native). Some said he drank (because he was part Irish). I’d always hated people having opinions based on stereotypes. Because he was a quiet, reserved, very shy and undemanding man, one parent had even accused him of being controlled by the devil. None of it stuck. He called himself “teflon man.”

  “Tinny, you want half a sandwich? I’m going the vegan route for a while — no meat or dairy. But it’s not half bad. I miss meat, though.”

  “No thanks. Just want to hang for a while. I’m hiding, really.”

  “Gotta hide sometime. Better to hide than run.”

  Things got quiet after that. The furnace was singing away and that sounded pretty good to us. I watched Declan eat his sandwich.

  “Pan-fried tofu with caraway and garlic. I’m not saying it’s great but I’m giving it a try. Girlfriend’s a vegan so I have to at least give it a try.”