1380 pairs of men throwing balls in the park.
Tall men, short men. Men of astoundingly pure racial lineage. Men as mutts.
Spherical balls. Balls teetering on the brink of deflation. Small, faceted balls, balls officially licensed for game play in certain sports and certain other sports.
Each man throws his ball only to his predetermined partner. There is but one ball per pair of men. Many, many, many potential combinations of men and balls are herein represented, but by no means do all possible combinations exist.
On a whim, perhaps by accident, the 1380 pairs of men become a brain. Spectators picnicking in the park are pleased by the decision, perhaps in excess of its worth.
“Do thirst!” shouts one such spectator.
Very carefully and intricately, pairs of men toss balls in a pattern, and before long there is thirst. In gratitude, the spectators quench it.
“Do discomfort brought on by cold!” recommends another.
Diligently tossing their balls, the pairs of men generate shivering, with a bit of teeth-chattering for good measure. Spectators from all sides are enthused.
“Try ambition!”
With great care, the pairs set to their task, but after several minutes they have failed to produce ambition, instead having wrought locomotion with a northbound vector. More pairs of men, apparently, are required for ambition, which is after all a rather convoluted thing. These new pairs are recruited by a compulsory draft, a process lasting billions of years. The spectators are patient throughout.
At last, some thirty million pairs strong, the men and their patterned tossing execute an exquisite rendition of ambition. Old-timers and picnicking onlookers agree it is the pairs’ finest product to date.
Then it comes time to do ennui, and James, a heavyset Irishman, routinely tosses a Titleist NXT Tour golf ball to Evan, an ex-tunneler standing some twenty feet away. James overshoots, sending the ball well over Evan’s worn-in synthetic leather catcher’s mitt and into the thicket behind him.
“Shit,” James says. They take to hands and knees in pursuit of the lost Titleist. Lawrence, who was MVP of his high school lacrosse team, jogs over to ask if he can be of any assistance.
“Don’t think so,” Evan says. “We dug ourselves into this hole, and—”
“Are you certain?” Lawrence asks. “I’m very good at lacrosse, which involves being aware of the location of a ball in a field. I may be well-suited to the task at hand.”
“We’re sure,” Evan says.
“Well,” suggests Lawrence, “I’m famished, anyhow, and so’s my partner, Lorenzo. How’s about we lend you this here Koosh ball for the time being, get us some supper, reconvene here in a half-hour?”
“It’s a nice ball,” Lorenzo adds. “Molto soft. Molto easy to catch.”
Under such an agreement, play proceeds, and a faintly flawed ennui comes to be. Only Lawrence and Lorenzo, at the sidelines munching frankfurters on potato rolls with chili sauce, notice any imperfections.
“It was ennui, sì,” is Lorenzo’s verdict, “but it could have been better.”
Lawrence is harsher. “My mother has done a better ennui single-handedly.”
As it turns out, he and Lorenzo never deign to return, bequeathing their Koosh ball in absentia to James and Evan, who much prefer it to their misplaced Titleist. Said Titleist remains in the thicket. Either that or it becomes the first victim of a new metaphysical phenomenon in which things actually disappear.
The brain of aggregated pairs, meanwhile, continues apace, and it isn’t always pretty. At spectators’ requests, they do a Weltschmerz that derives as mere melancholy. Their jubilation is distinctly lacking in jubilance. Most egregious yet is their temerity, which, after an extremely complicated bout of ball-tossing, turns out as fecklessness.
“Something is not right,” James tells Evan, who vigorously agrees.
“What should we do about it?”
“Maybe ask around a wee bit,” says James in his brogue. “Maybe see what’s up with these other clowns.”
But getting the attention of another pair, what with all the tossing, proves difficult, and in order to be recognized Evan winds up heaving the Koosh ball at another man’s head. The latter collapses with a grunt.
James, Evan, and the collapsed man’s tossing partner cluster around him, looking down at his body, which is motionless and by all signs lifeless. Beneath the din of 29,999,997 balls being tossed – the sounds of throwing and the noises of catching – there is an unmistakable death rattle.
“Rats,” James says. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Don’t be,” says the collapsed man’s partner, who introduces himself as Aaron. “He was weak, and prone to navel-gazing. It was for the best.”
They all nod.
“And besides,” Aaron goes on, “the glory days are over, for us. Small errors have crept into the system’s patterns. Whole parts of the grid have lost the ability to function. It’s only a matter of time.”
“There’s a grid?” asks Evan.
“There’s a system?” asks James.
“There were glory days?” says the collapsed man, who as it turns out is very near death but not quite there, yet.
“I’ve said too much,” Aaron says. “My integral function in certain higher-level processes makes me privy to such information. I’m downwind from some very important shit.”
He’s right. Across the park, gaffes are being made at the bottommost of levels. Carlson, a former Marine whose biggest fear is premature ejaculation, can be heard saying, “My biggest fear is nuclear proliferation.” Mêlées, tussles and kerfuffles have broken out; using myriad volleyballs, a band of mutineers are producing twitches every hour on the hour. One spectator has been waiting to see envy for twelve years, and is seeking in vain a complaints department, contaminating an entire lobe in so doing. Someone somewhere has gotten hold of a cricket bat.
The applause of the remaining spectators is very polite. Too polite to be heard, really, over the racket of tossing and catching.
“I tell ya,” Aaron remarks, “conditions like these make a guy yearn for the primordial ooze, the purposeless splendor of it all.”
“The ooze was, indeed, spectacular,” James says. “I carry faint, untraceable memories of it.”
Many feel the same way, evidently. Involuntarily, the pairs come together for what will be their final performance, an intense bout of self-scrutiny. Because they have a vested interest in this piece above all others, it goes off without a hitch, though it proves to be exceptionally draining and frightens away the spectators. Self-scrutiny reveals a thin awareness – more of a membrane – of primordial ooze across the boards. This is a refreshing but dangerous discovery, if it can be called such in good conscience.
“I’ll be damned,” proclaims Aaron, and the end comes very rapidly.
Gene, once a pastor, furiously thumbs the pages of The Purpose Driven Life, thinking it may prevent a certain negative outcome. Gene’s the only man standing still, a static among dynamics. Millions of balls and glass bottles whiz by at alarming velocities.
“Aha!” he says, holding the book above his head and pointing to a passage with his index finger. He clears his throat and prepares to begin a reading.
But Gene is much too late, he sees as his knees give out. The men in the park have gotten drunk, and died.
