Arp noisily sucked down the dregs of his drink and walked over to his friend’s side. At least he could share his experiences with Jay and perhaps get some reassurance.
“Jay, listen to what happened to me yesterday…”
Like a good pal, Jay paid attentive heed, even while he fussed with the trucks of his deck, picking out aluminum flinders. Arp finished his account with the epiphany that had just struck him.
Jay remained silent for an interval, and then said, “Follow me.”
Arp trailed Jay over to a spot in the vast pillared space where a storage firm had stacked a giant mound of cartons before going bankrupt. Weather-beaten and decaying, the listing cartons contained hundreds of thousands of big rough glass marbles that served as feedstock in fiberglass production.
Jay stood by one corner of the mound and said, “Watch this.” He surveyed the setup intently, and then, with both hands, peeled away the lower half of one shoddy carton.
Immediately, all the marbles began to avalanche noisily out of the ripped carton, spilling across the floor like frightened mice. As that carton deflated, the ones above it and around it began also to tip and burst, releasing their contents. Ultimately, a flood of marbles caused the boys to dance backward. The avalanche finally ceased of its own volition when a new equilibrium in the pile of cartons had been reached.
Jay gestured to the sea of marbles. “Okay, show me the moves you would make to get them all back to where they were.”
Arp snorted. “That’s impossible!”
“Of course it is. And you know why as well as I do. It’s entropy. The whole universe is rigged for chaos. Mankind is fucked from the start. There are so many more crummy states of being than good ones, that the odds are stacked against us doing anything useful or desirable. Chances are that whatever move we make will result in a lousy outcome. That’s how a single person can cause so much grief with so little effort. I don’t care whether it’s a pile of marbles or sand or snow, or some kind of human system, like a computer program or a democracy. Chances are, you stick your oar in, you just churn up a shitstorm. One little wrong twist of your car’s steering wheel, and you’ve got a mile-long fatal pileup involving a hundred other people. Not some kind of spontaneous Shriners parade.”
Arp nodded thoughtfully. “It’s all true. Entropy rules, and that sucks. You and I have talked about this before. Murphy’s Law is a bitch. But you don’t understand exactly what I’m getting at. First off, we know that humans are negentropy agents. Even if only temporarily, we can push chaos back. But that’s not even what I’m theorizing here. It’s more like, more like –”
“Yeah, more like what? I’m waiting.”
The perfect analogy from science struck Arp like a dodgeball taking out a nerd in the gymnasium of his mind. “It’s like the Butterfly Effect!”
“Butterfly wags its wings in Brazil, you get a blizzard in Chicago?”
“Yes! By being in just the right place and doing just the right thing, a small action can launch a major result. It’s called, um, sensible impedance –”
“‘Sensitive dependence on initial conditions,’ jerkface!” Jason pondered where the discussion was leading. “And you’re saying you can suddenly see just what the butterfly has to do for something specific to happen?”
“Yeah, exactly! It’s not something I can verbalize, and if I tried to pass on the knowledge to anyone else, the moment would have slipped away. And you obviously can’t achieve every possible outcome from any given starting point in time and space. You’d be limited to the network of cause and effect radiating out from that particular moment in spacetime. But I can do it, I know! I did it in class!”
“How come all of a sudden?”
“How the hell do I know? My body’s changing! Maybe I was bitten by a radioactive butterfly!”
Jason punched Arp in the shoulder. “Did it feel anything like that?”
Arp punched back, and the two tussled for a few seconds. Breaking out of a clinch, Jason ran a hand through his flyaway hair and said, “Arp, my buddy, we need to experiment with this new skill of yours. And I’ve got just the goal to shoot for.”
Arp and Jason meandered through the GM Ren Cen. On this Saturday, the mall was packed with families and packs of teens, squads of power-walking elderly and alert security guards.
“You seen any invisible hooks yet?” asked Jason.
“I don’t think of them as hooks,” said Arp. “That analogy just doesn’t work somehow. It’s not anything that reaches out and grabs me. It’s more like –”
“Sweet spots! That’s what you’re seeing. The Nexus of All Realities, like where Man-Thing lives! Except there’s millions of them everywhere! Millions of little nex-eyes!”
“Yeah, right. No, that’s not exactly it either.”
“Or maybe it’s more like the universe’s clit! Tickle it just right, and everything explodes. You should know, the way you always score with Ronnie K!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Seething at his friend’s crude yet cutting joke, Arp surged ahead, entering the food court on Level A. Jason caught up with him, genuinely apologetic.
“Aw, c’mon, did you forget I was a lowlife ballbuster? Look, I’ll buy you a couple of dogs at Coney Town, okay?”
Mollified, yet feeling slightly bummed that he had not yet encountered the sweet spot he was searching for at Jason’s behest, Arp agreed to the offer.
Seated at a table with their food, Arp and Jason ate and surveyed the passing scene.
In the middle of the food court, employees were setting up an inflatable bounce house for the enjoyment of the kiddies. The muted roar of the fan designed to keep the structure erect and bouncy suddenly sounded, as the blower underwent a test activation. Then the fan was shut off and disconnected from the flattened bounce house for examination of its workings.
And that was when Arp saw the desired sweet spot, pure and potent and invisible to anyone but him.
He only had time briefly to advise Jason – “Watch!” – before the moment demanded his action.
Arp threw his half-eaten hotdog at a nearby trashcan, deliberately undershooting so that the food waste landed on the floor.
One of the ever-circulating food court cleaning staff, armed with broom and dustpan, saw the defiantly messy gesture and spun around indignantly to confront and chastise Arp.
The handle of the guy’s horizontally held, lance-like, fast-moving broom caught a geezer right in his stomach, causing him to
oof
and stumble against his geezer wife. The woman lurched forward, catapulting her many bursting bags of purchases directly under the feet of one particular passerby.
This important passerby, a brown-clad UPS delivery fellow, was pushing his heavily laden flatbed at top speed across the polished floor. He tripped over the strewn consumer goods and went down, releasing his grip on his cart, altering its vector and even imparting a slightly greater impetus to it.
The cart barrelled toward the kneeling bounce house worker inspecting the fan. He activated the blower just as the cart took him out and glancingly hit the fan.
The roaring untethered fan swivelled around on its wheels and caught a new group in its blast.
Entering the food court at that exact moment, the heretofore-unseen shoppers who became the target of the rogue blower consisted of a pack of insouciant and attitudinous Bad Girls. These adolescent Snooki-lookalikes wore crop tops emblazoned with legends such as FUTURE MILF and GUESS WHERE I’M PIERCED. They also sported incredibly abbreviated skirts over bare legs.
Whomped by the blast from the high-powered fan, the shrieking girls felt their fluttering minuscule skirts being blown skyward. They fought at first to tug down their garments, but then a pedestal table bearing a highly breakable sugar shaker crashed into the path of the whirlwind, and their eyes were filled with flying sucrose, forcing them to abandon decorum. Now their various styles of risqué undergarments, barely concealing a catalogue of tramp stamps, were on shameful display.
As various Good Samaritans and mall employees raced to the aid of the Bad Girls, Jason turned to Arp with awe suffusing his face.
Arp said coolly, “You asked me to provide…?”
“Girls in their underwear standing around in the mall. Sweet bleeding Jesus!”
The next several days after the stirringly and reassuringly confirmational mall incident, Arp faced nearly continuous uncertainty about how to proceed with his new powers. The aching dilemma occupied his mind almost every minute. A pure case of ‘new superhero’ angst. The whole “With great power…” thing.
Should he proceed selfishly, as unconflicted Jason counselled, employing his gifts solely for personal satisfaction?
Or should he embark on a course of selfless altruism, seeking to right a worldful of wrongs?
Didn’t he have an obligation to function as a counteragent to all the entropic fuckups accidentally sowing pain and disorder everywhere? Walking through airport security the wrong way and immobilizing thousands? Tapping into oil pipelines and causing massive conflagrations? Speeding down a freeway and racking up scores of crashed vehicles?
But on the other hand, how could he know just what goals would best reverberate to mankind’s advantage?
Suppose he pushed at a sweet spot to force the discovery of a brand new mega-barrel oil field in the Gulf of Mexico? He had actually half-sensed just such a sweet spot lurking at the periphery of his consciousness. It was over in Chicago somewhere, a not unreasonable distance to cover, given the payoff. Sure, doing so would make a lot of rich people richer and even help some middle-class schlubs and the general economy. But what would the long-term effects be? More pollution, a swifter plummet into Greenhouse Earth? How could he, sixteen-year-old average teenager Arpad Stroll, make such decisions wisely? Wouldn’t he be better off just going for little things that would mean a lot to him alone? But what a waste of his gifts!
The circular labyrinth of reasoning and worrying preoccupied Arp for a week during which, despite Jason’s imploring, he did not employ his powers again. And, to add insult to injury, he had to deal with an old problem as well.
Blueberry Chefafa.
Blueberry Chefafa was in love with Arpad Stroll, and the feeling was not mutual. Just as he pined for Ronnie Kingslake, so Blue longed for him.
Really, there was no solid reason for Arp’s lack of interest in the pretty girl. Granted, Blue was not a knockout like Veronica, but her distinctive looks, derived from a blend of African-American and Greco-American genes, attracted many a male glance. There was, admittedly, the matter of her, ah, somewhat robust build to contend with. No petite princess, Blue captained the female wrestling squad at Edward Lorenz High. To report that the team was undefeated was to convey something of Blueberry’s possibly intimidating physicality. Arp knew from experience that she could beat him at arm-wrestling. But her muscles were packed along attractive curves, and she certainly sported a more impressive rack than slim and WASPy Ronnie. And Blue’s academic record matched her sporting accomplishments: sharp and quick, she excelled in the classes she shared with Arp.
No, there was no reason not to have the hots for Blue, other than the sheer mysteries of the heart.
But would the girl give up in the face of Arp’s deliberate cold shoulder? Never! She pestered Arp ceaselessly, doing him unrequested favors, finding reasons to be wherever he was, casting meaningful glances his way in crowds, getting her friends to go to bat for her. It was enough to give a guy the jitters.
The week of Arp’s special befuddlement, Blueberry exhibited extra attentiveness toward the object of her affection, as if she could detect that something potent was troubling Arp. She even showed up at his house, ostensibly bringing news of a homework assignment she thought he had missed hearing about. It took him half an hour to ditch her.
And now here she was, in Mrs. Christelli’s class, auditing it for extra credit during her study period, she claimed, and seated right next to Arp. Her foot had strayed more than once into his personal space, and she kept fluffing her abundant dark hair to waft the scents of her floral shampoo his way. What a pain in the ass!
Mrs. Christelli, fully recovered from her spill of a week past, finished cabling her laptop to the big flatscreen at the front of the room. “Today, class, we are going to watch the most recent episode of NOVA. The topic is earth-grazing asteroids, how to detect them and what might be done to stop one from impacting the planet. I’m sure you will all find it extremely interesting.”
The lights went down, giving Blueberry a chance to inch closer, and the screen came alive with solar system vistas and the narrator’s placid yet somehow alarmist voice.
“Always at risk for another celestial impact event such as the one during the Permian-Triassic era that killed ninety per cent of life on Earth, our planet dodges many near-misses each year. In fact, scientists at the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch mission currently have their telescopes focused on one newly observed and fast-moving asteroid, dubbed Perses after the destructive Titan of Greek mythology. The experts are nearly certain that the hurtling rock will miss our world, but the projected clearance is the smallest ever recorded…”
Blueberry took that cue to utter a gasp of exaggerated fright and grab Arp’s arm. That was when he lost it.