Yesterday Sounds Interesting

            by Anthony Granados

 

Mr. Gavisham had fallen from football stardom at the age of 28 when a truck driver had smashed up his leg with a wooden stool in a bar fight. The event had drawn him into a devout belief in God and, when that same truck driver lost both his arms in an accident, Karma. The idea of Karma entailed a very specific logic for Mr. Gavisham: the world had wronged him, therefore it was his duty to wrong the world. He had quickly found his niche in the great American education system making life generally miserable for small or out of shape kids, or anybody he suspected would become a truck driver. In addition to teaching P.E., Mr. Gavisham lorded over after school detention with an attitude of careless totalitarianism. His rules were arbitrary and variable; the only constant: his certain displeasure with whatever the students happened to be doing.

On Friday, May 25, at around 4:15, Mr. Gavisham was engaged in a consuming struggle with his monthly crossword puzzle, accompanied by constant grumbling and interrupted only by occasional and intensely annoyed glares in the direction of Win and Gizmo. Win and Gizmo did not move. They did not fidget, eat, sneeze, yawn, or stare out the window at the infuriatingly sunny Friday afternoon that they were spending in the care of Mr. Gavisham. Win contemplated his fingers. Gizmo observed a confused ant wander across his desk.

The less a student moved, the less Mr. Gavisham paid attention to him (it was for this reason that Gizmo thought Mr. Gavisham was part bull, or moose, or whichever animal did that motion-vision thing). Gizmo had considered trying to hold his breath through detention, but Win had told him he would just pass out. Gizmo had still considered it, deciding that a concussion and a trip to the nurse was preferable to 2 hours with Mr. Gavisham.

“Sherman! You slimy, spineless Lilliputian! Sit up straight! I will tolerate no slouching in this room.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Gizmo strained to attain crystalline rigidity, with the effect of appearing constipated and in danger of falling out of his seat. Win said nothing but raised an eyebrow, trying to glance over at his friend without moving his head. He hadn’t known Gizmo’s real name.

Win and Gizmo had met at freshman orientation and had become close friends; partly out of their common fascination with gadgets, but mostly out of desperation. Gizmo stood at a towering five foot two and he both looked and acted strange. His face had a perpetual asymmetry, as though the two sides were each trying to express a different emotion. Win was tall and lanky and awkward, and despite his parent’s high expectations, he failed at pretty much everything from advanced algebra to talking with girls, which seemed to amount to about the same thing in Win’s mind. Generally, the two shared the mutual goal of remaining as close to invisible as possible, but Gizmo’s particular and peculiar obsession with tinkering tended to result in some unwanted attention. The offense that had landed them in detention was actually an accident. Gizmo had constructed a device to “siphon” some of the water from the school’s plumbing, for the ostensible purpose of creating a fountain. Gizmo’s understanding of plumbing systems was proven to be rudimentary at best, and a couple of cheerleaders were unexpectedly ejected from their stalls in one of the girl’s bathrooms by high-powered blasts of water (Win wasn’t actually sure this had been an accident). Events of that sort were not uncommon around Gizmo, and both he and Win had come to be unfortunately familiar with after school detentions and the temperament of Mr. Gavisham, who at that moment was arising from his desk with all the alacrity of a walrus.

“I’ve gotta take a piss. If either of you worthless, sniveling worms has moved so much as a toe when I get back, I’ll make it my personal goal that your days at this school are as miserable as humanly possible. Have I made myself abundantly clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Win didn’t really think of that as much of a threat, since making their lives miserable was what Mr. Gavisham did with his time anyways.

As soon as the door closed behind Mr. Gavisham’s bulk, Gizmo let out a huge breath.

“You know Win, I think he’s still mad at me for that accident that happened in December.”

“Which one? I lose track.” Win had started to mess with the ant on Gizmo’s desk.

“You know, with the super glue and the hair gel?”

“Oh yeah, that. You’re calling that an accident?”

“Well, no, but I didn’t think he would ever wear a Santa hat.”

“But you did give him a magician’s cap for a Christmas pres—"

“Hey!” Gizmo yelled, pointing at the window. “It’s unlocked! He never unlocks the windows.”

“And this means…? He’s becoming senile and demented? He’s showing signs of spring frivolity?”

“No no no. This means escape! Sweet freedom, fresh air, movement, slouching, all things good in life.”

“Gizmo, if you think I’m jumping from a second-story window…” The ant had fled to the underside of the desk, and Win was bending out of his seat to continue trying to poke it.

“Nope,” Gizmo shook his head. “We’ll climb down the drainpipe.”

Win looked up and rustled Gizmo’s carrot-orange hair. “You’re a genius.”

Gizmo grinned.

Sixty seconds later, the window was fully open and Gizmo was negotiating the transfer from window ledge to drainpipe. Win had one leg out the window and was reaching for the pipe when the door opened. Win froze. Mr. Gavisham entered the room and stopped, staring in confusion at first the empty seats and then the student who was half out his window. Mr. Gavisham was not blessed with an overabundance of brains, and the connection didn’t jump into place with any immediacy. Meanwhile, Gizmo had noticed Win’s sudden lack of motion.

“Win, what is it? Why aren’t you…” Gizmo paused. “He’s back, isn’t he. Yup, we’re screwed.”

Win remained frozen. “Gizmo. Move. Now.”

As Gizmo began scrambling down, Win made a valiant and rather unintelligent leap for the drainpipe, and Mr. Gavisham charged. In Win’s mind, he would reach out with one hand and grab the pipe and sort of swing his body into a two-handed hold on it while wrapping his legs around the lower part. The radical bifurcation between this idea and reality occurred when Win’s first hand slipped on the wet metal of the drainpipe. He fell, crashing onto the unsuspecting Gizmo, and then both of them fell onto a very unsuspecting, and rather unfortunate, rosemary bush. The bush broke Gizmo’s fall; Gizmo broke Win’s fall. The pair then sprinted for the school gates, hounded all the way by the bellowing of Mr. Gavisham, though whether because of the escaped students or because he’d crashed bodily into the window, they didn’t know. (Gizmo was favoring the smashed-into-the-window idea.)

 

The pair only stopped running when they reached the safety of a grassy park many, many blocks away from the school. From the school and, more importantly, from Mr. Gavisham. Win sprawled on the grass to catch his breath.

“Gizmo, you do realize that he’s going to kill us.” Win turned his head in the direction of his friend.

“Well, maybe he’ll be nice because we ran so fast. Maybe he’ll raise our grades in P.E.”

“Nice…?” Win hadn’t moved past that word.

Gizmo sat down and picked up a tiny twig. “Yeah, he’s going to kill us.”

The two rested in silence for a while. Win thought about the possibility of ritual suicide in the face of going to school on Monday. Or maybe he could just hide in his locker for a week with some pretzels, like the freakishly small Asian guy in Oceans 12 who got put into a suitcase. And then lost. Thoughts of plastic surgery began floating through his mind.

Meanwhile, Gizmo was focusing intently on his twig.

“Gizmo, what are you doing with that twig?” Win sat up, curious.

Gizmo didn’t look up. “I’m playing ant-on-a-stick.”

“You’re playing what now?”

“Ant-on-a-stick.”

“Gizmo, this is the 21^st century. We have iPods, TV, DVDs, radio stations, more video games than can be counted, and the eternally glorious Internet. And you’re playing ant-on-a-stick? I would bet money that cavemen had more entertaining ways of, well, keeping themselves entertained.”

Gizmo said nothing. There was a pause.

“So… how do you play?” Win asked, scootching closer to Gizmo and his twig.

Gizmo smiled, still intent upon his twig. “Well, first you have to select an appropriate stick. The size is a measure of how skilled you are.” He held up his own minuscule specimen. “Only true masters progress to playing ant-on-a-twig. Next you have to find a good ant. The fat ones tend to fall off the stick, but the small ones move faster when they get confused.”

“And… the idea is to confuse the ant?”

“Is there something else you can do with an ant?” Gizmo’s look made his opinion on this matter clear.

“Right, of course.”

Gizmo continued. “So then you have to manage to get your chosen ant onto your stick, which can be tricky. But once you’ve done that, the game is to keep switching your fingers so that the ant keeps running from one end of the stick to the other. Which confuses it. Which makes the game fun.” Gizmo smiled.

“How does the game end?” Win was struggling to get his ant to run onto his stick.

“Oh, well the ant runs out of energy and dies.” Gizmo was happily watching his own ant traverse his twig over and over. For a while, neither boy spoke. Win was patiently trying to coax his ant into behaving and Gizmo was patiently waiting for his ant to perish and fall to the ground. After a few dozen failed attempts, Win just poked his stick into the ground. The ant climbed up to the top of the stick and stopped. Win stared at the ant. The ant stared at Win.

“Gizmo, how come you never told me your real name?”

Gizmo had begun spinning his twig, with the goal of furthering ant confusion and eventual death.

“Gizmo is better than Sherman.”

“Yeah, but—“

“Gizmo is much better than Sherman Peabody Wadsworth.”

Win laughed. His ant ran away. Win decided to ignore the possibility of a connection.

“Oh yeah, well what’s your name, huh?”

Win stopped laughing. There was another pause. Gizmo’s ant was looking fatigued.

“Windsor Cockman Smedley.” Win’s voice was quiet.

Gizmo burst into a fit of giggles. His ant died.

“The third.” His voice was even quieter.

“The third?”

“The third.”

This was too much for Gizmo, who began to laugh so hard he cried. Win tried to look injured, but began laughing as well, which had the effect of making his face look almost as weird as Gizmo’s. As the chuckling died down, both boys lay sprawled on the grass.

“Win, do you ever think that we’re just like ants, and that all of life is just like this cosmic game of ant-on-a-stick where we all run around really confused, making the same mistakes over and over again until we run out of energy just like the ants do, and then we die, only to be replaced by fresh ants as collective society continues to impose contradicting and hypocritical expectations upon the individual ego?”

“Yes.”