Chapter 1: A Boy's Ball of Yarn

The expanse of their front lawn beyond the window panes of the living room rolled to the edge of the road like a slick emerald slide, as their home was perched upon a slight hill that fed into a quiet, mostly dormant street. Geo gazed longingly at the line of trees across from his house, its foliage lush and dense as though it hid something deeper beyond its wall. But the road was mostly empty, and he often wondered when a car or some other sign of life would stir his interest or lead him to some great adventure. It was more often the case that nothing pushed time forward except a few choice Woody Woodpecker cartoons or Looney Tunes reruns that he had nearly memorized by heart, save for the line of credits at the beginnings of them.

Geo sat in the living room of his family’s drafty colonial home that stood along a quiet street. He had had enough sitting in his high-chair and being fed the usual oatmeal porridge his mother warmed in break-proof bowls and served strictly at mealtimes. She sweetened it with sugar, and the sugary porridge served as a kind of salvation from the sins of boredom and, on occasion, paling around with friends from Local School No. 43 about a half mile away. After learning how to tie his shoelaces and coloring on blank sheets of construction paper in kindergarten, he knew his life had much more in store, now that he was entering first grade at the local school. His old friends made the move with him into first grade, and the few math and word problems his teacher had given him were right on target with his abilities. But when he came home after an abbreviated play-group on most afternoons, he would only watch a few cartoons, ask his mother for some cookies and milk, and then get on his mother’s nerves. He constantly asked his mother if he could go out and play with the other boys, but as was often the case, she ordered him to do his homework before any horsing around with his friends could be done.

On that particular afternoon, however, as he sat on the floor restless before his father came home, he sensed that his mother in the adjacent room deserved to be bothered again. When he fell into moods such as this – of wanting to bother his mother for no good reason at all other than to be paid attention to – he would tiptoe into the room where she could be found knitting a blue sweater. Once safely inside, he would yell at the top of his lungs. She would then jump out of her seat and chase him through the house, where he would hide in the same closet he had always hidden in. She usually discovered him buried beneath a pile of his father’s old clothes, tickling him and then leaving him panting from an extreme laughter that left him exhausted and a little sleepy before dinner.

On the afternoon in question, he prepared to scare his mother again. Carefully he moved quickly along the furry carpet and hid behind the big brown sofa where he saw his mother working on another grand project. His objective was to surprise her as he had never surprised her before, as he thought himself to be at the pinnacle of manhood that was the first grade. So this, he thought, would be the scare that topped all scares, as he was a man that topped all men. It would make his mother jump as she never jumped before, and he wouldn’t hide in the same-old musty closet anymore. Why, he’d actually use the stairs and hide in the basement, or perhaps run up to the bedroom and mess up the loveliness of his parents’ neatly-made bed - comforter, sheets, and all.

But there would be no surprises that afternoon. When Geo sneaked into the room and winced at how the floorboards creaked and snapped much too loudly for him to get away with his most elaborate secret plan, his mother simply turned around and stared at him face-to-face as though she were ready and waiting for him all along. This had happened only a few times before, and it spoiled whatever fun he expected out of the encounter. She didn’t seem to be too interested in chasing him around the house that afternoon either. A pile of blue yarn, all balled-up like round scoops of blueberry ice-cream, sat on the thick oak table beside her. She held knitting needles that came attached to what promised to be the lower-half of her new sweater. She looked a bit tired, and her watery blue eyes gazed beyond him into some vague memory that Geo didn’t have access to. She wasn’t crying exactly, but she seemed preoccupied by an idea that didn’t necessarily involve him, and this was a cause of concern to him who assumed that his mother paid all of her thoughts and attentions to him and no one else.

She did smile at him, however, as though there were some glint of wisdom he had yet to learn from her. He had had enough of learning at the school, and now his own mother had something to teach him? The audacity of it all! ‘Forget it,’ he thought. He headed back towards the living room with a definite plan to surprise her tomorrow, but before he could leave, his mother grabbed hold of his pudgy arm and selected one of the attractive balls of blue yarn from the pile next to her. The color of the yarn was more azure than dark blue and had been rolled up into tightly round beautiful ball.

“If you’re bored, I want you to play with this until Daddy gets home,” she said.

She placed the blue ball of yarn in his hands as though it were a treasured gift she parted with, and the gesture was so mysterious and extraordinary that Geo didn’t know how to respond. First of all, he didn’t know what to do with the ball of yarn, and secondly, he didn’t see it as such a great gift at first.

“Now go and play with it,” she said. “You’re getting older now, and Mommy doesn’t like being scared when she’s working anymore.”

Stunned by this near-fatal blow, he could do nothing but utter a weak and polite ‘thank you’ and wander dizzily back to the living room with his new ball of blue yarn that offered very little in terms of the adventurous excitement he craved. He returned to the television and plunked himself back down on the carpet, the blue ball of yarn in his hands.

He thought the idea of playing with the ball of yarn a little foolish. There wasn’t much one could do with a ball of yarn except hold it, or use his small fingers to rotate it in his palm, or perhaps throw it at Daffy Duck who kept trying in vain to get Bugs Bunny in trouble. Daffy always lost for some reason, and there was nothing he could do about it, which was another source of frustration. He threw the ball at the television screen several times, but the yarn just rolled back to him. It didn’t even bounce very well, and so the boy had a tough time wondering how he would make a plaything out of it. He was, however, fascinated by its color and how each thick strand overlapped the other thick strands so tightly that the ball refused to lose its shape. He rolled it on the carpet and threw it at the television a few more times until he realized that the ball of yarn was useless when it came to providing the entertainment needed to fill time until dinner. His father would be home by then, and perhaps he could throw the ball of yarn at his head while he ate.

When the pink sun set behind the tree-line across the road, however, a rosy hue flooded the living room, and the yarn turned a brilliant color, as the blue of the thread had more luster and depth to it. Geo suddenly stopped rolling it on the carpet and gazed at it for a while. For the first time in his life, he came into contact with what might have been a true work of art. The ball withstood his squeezing, rolling, and throwing it around so well, that there must have been something special about it, some kind of resilience that this ball claimed, and it stunned him how it still managed to retain its shape and beauty through the harrowing tests he put it through. When bathed in the pinkish light of the setting sun, the ball became something to be preserved and not to be toyed with as he did with his collection of Matchbox cars and plastic infantry men. The ball of yarn was different all of a sudden, because it seemed the definition of true beauty. It was perfectly round and uniform, its thread a vast network of lines that hid a hardened core underneath it, as though it contained a mystery or a puzzle that couldn’t be solved so easily. His new perspective made a marvel out of the simple ball of yarn, and it wasn’t long before he fell in love with it. He promised not to disturb it any longer and decided to preserve it on his shelf or at least tuck it away in his chest of toys for safe-keeping.

But as he held the ball of yarn up to his nose and inspected the tight, intersecting lines of thread, Geo noticed an imperfection that put his initial excitement to rest. While playing with it, one of the threads had frayed from the compact whole and stood a inch high off of what could have been a perfectly-rounded surface. The ball of yarn had suddenly lost most of its beauty right then and there.

He could only blame himself for such an abnormality, and he wanted to tell his mother about this aberration but knew he shouldn’t disturb her. At the dinner table, though, he discussed the ball of yarn and the strange dilemma of the loose thread. He secretly wanted to run up stairs and view the ball of yarn again to find out why it had unraveled a little. His parents just looked at each other a little amused by their child’s fascination with it. Yet before he went to sleep that night, he knew he had to do something, as he yearned for that initial feeling of beholding a truly beautiful treasure for the very first time, and with that single, confounded thread sticking up from the surface, much like a single strand of hair that stands upright from an otherwise shiny and slickly-combed scalp, the ball of yarn suddenly needed fixing – only he didn’t know how to go about fixing it.

It wasn’t like he could pat it down or smooth it over or mold it back into shape like a ball of overly-kneaded play-dough. Similarly, if he tugged at the thread, the yarn might unravel just a little bit more, and wouldn’t it look tremendously odd that a perfectly round ball would suddenly have a wavy strand dangling from it like a misplaced noodle? How disappointing! He needed to repair it, certainly, but he didn’t know how, and he soon concocted a plan to smuggle the ball of yarn into the school the next morning and have his friends take a look at it to see what they could do. He needed to find a way to tame the anarchy it represented, and perhaps his friends had a solution to the mayhem occurring on the ball’s blue surface. He needed a second opinion, and he barely made it through a rambunctious night dreaming how perfect it could be. He hoped that the problem of the loose thread could be solved quietly, quickly, and painlessly.

The trick was to smuggle the ball out of the house without his mother catching him. And Geo used all of his gifted faculties available and a few cleverly orchestrated moves to carry out the mission. It amounted to sneaking the ball of yarn into his Batman-themed lunch box as his mother’s back was turned.

At breakfast, she allowed him to sit at the table that morning instead of the high-chair, and as her back turned to squeeze oranges, he quietly hid the ball of yarn underneath a Zip-Lock bag of chocolate chip cookies and closed his lunch box just a second before his mother turned around.

“What did you just do there?” she asked while abandoning the oranges and spooning another helping of oatmeal mush into his bowl.

“Nothing, Mom,” he said innocently enough.

His mother didn’t push the issue any farther, although she looked at him suspiciously for a moment or two. It would be the first of many fibs he would use to elude the interrogations and the suspicions of his mother for years to come. Geo’s plan had worked well, and he boarded the yellow school bus and kept quiet about the yarn in his lunch pail until his friends could help him with the problem.

The courtyard of Local School No. 43 had to be managed properly if he were to sneak passed the girls playing patty-cake and showing off the latest accoutrements to their Barbie and Ken collections. It required a speed and a skill that he thought he wasn’t capable of, but luckily, at this stage of his first-grade development, the boys disliked the girls, and the girls disliked the boys. The rare bird that traveled between the two camps was often ostracized for it. And like most of his pals, he gave the girls an angry look as he walked passed them. This kept the girls at bay until he finally landed in the company of his three friends who ran in circles around him trying to tag each other out.

“Stop this childishness,” commanded Geo. “We have more important matters to contend with.”

The boys stopped in their tracks and looked at him as though they had seen a reincarnation of some of the world leaders they read about in their history textbooks. The three boys panted in exhaustion before Geo pulled them to a quiet corner of the courtyard away from the dreaded door to the schoolhouse where their teachers had the most annoying habit of calling them into their classes. They huddled over Geo’s lunch box, and he even made them utter a small prayer before opening the lid and revealing the sky-blue ball of yarn that sat within.

The other boys gasped at its beauty as he brought it out for all of them to see.

“My God,” said Dickie, the oldest boy of the four, “where did you get it?”

“It’s not a good idea to bring something like this here,” said Carlo, the shorter resident mystic of the group.

The third friend, an African-American named Colin, smiled knowingly, as though he had predicted that such a treasure would finally manifest itself in the courtyard, but he said nothing and only smiled.

Geo also smiled triumphantly, as he knew then and there that he had owned and possessed a special work of art that none of his friends could ever possess.

“I know what it is,” said Dickie, using his wisdom and experience as the eldest boy in the group. “See, what we could do is roll the ball into the circles of those we don’t like, especially the girls, and then from out of the ball will emerge these robot, machine-like claws, like the ones on my Tonka truck, and these claws will poke through the ball of yarn, and what will happen next is that these claws will turn into a giant robot and grab all of the women playing pattie-cake and hold them in its grip, so that, finally, we don’t have to hear them playing that stupid game anymore.”

But then Carlo announced his idea.

“No, no,” he said, “this ball can be so much more, because whoever holds it will be able to harness a power that this earth has never known. Because the person who holds it high above his head will hypnotize everyone around it, hypnotize them enough for them to worship it. Out of the ball will come these flashing lights, like an electrical storm, and from out of the center of it these laser beams will fire right into the eyes of everyone who looks at it, and soon the entire school will be hypnotized by the ball, and we can do whatever we tell them to do, even our teachers. And people will come to worship the ball from all around the neighborhood, and if people think they can break its spell – think again. The laser beams will keep on hitting their eyes, hypnotizing them all over again.”

Colin was a bit skeptical by their ideas, and offered only this:

“It’s a beautiful ball indeed, but we have to be careful with it. We need a plan to get rid of it if it starts to get too unmanageable – especially if it starts to take over. The ball can be many things, and I was thinking that it could be used as a ball in a game of catch – something simple, direct, and short-lived. Because if we let it get the better of us, we’ll have one big mess on our hands. I think we should keep it the way it is – it’s perfect, blue self, and that we use it wisely.”

“C’mon, Colin,” Dickie and Carlo seemed to say at the same time.

“This ball has amazing potential,” said Dickie, explaining his reaction. “We can’t just let it be a simple ball. We can’t just let it be what it is. The potential is enormous.”

“I’m saying we use it,” said Colin, “but we use it wisely and carefully is all I’m saying.”

“You’re so boring,” countered Dickie. “My idea is that we should use it to start rounding up people right away.”

“That’s stupid,” said Carlo. “Why round them up when we can have them do anything we want them to do?”

They continued to argue over the blue ball of yarn while slapping each other’s back in excitement at the same time.

“Wait a minute,” said Colin. “What’s that there?”

“What?” said Geo.

“There,” pointed Colin at the hanging thread that seemed to have grown since its lunch box confinement.

“Oh, that? That’s nothing,” said Geo.

All of a sudden, the smiles on his friend’s faces turned thin and ponderous. They stood over the ball in silence, their disappointment palpable.

“Okay,” said Geo, “so there’s obviously a problem.”

“Damn right there’s a problem,” said Dickie. “Look at that thing. It’s disgusting.”

“This must mean something,” said Carlo. “It must mean something indeed.”

“We must fix it all costs,” said Colin. “Otherwise, this thing’s worthless.”

And for a while more, as the rest of the children yelled, screamed, and ran about in the courtyard, his friends openly expressed their confusion and disappointment that such a ball of yarn could be so beautiful and yet so flawed at the same time. In their deliberations, the first friend started ranting and raving at it.

“It’s the yarn-maker’s fault,” cried Dickie. “You have to go to those corporate-types and demand that they fix it. They can’t get a away with this. They just can’t. I know the owner too – a real blowhard if I ever saw one. They’re all part of this secret society, the commies that are taking over. It’s all about who owns the wool, y’know – who owns it and how they make us decent children pay for it.”

The other two friends chimed in with similar rants against the atrocities of the yarn-makers, until there came a point when all four of the boys openly and unabashedly yelled at the ball of yarn and criticized the corporate sector that sold its imperfect thread.

Just then one of the teachers swung open the door to the interior of the school, and the boys quieted down and feigned happy smiles as she passed. They made sure not to let on about the blue ball of yarn which had catastrophically lost its beauty. And at a free period in the school day the four of them met in private in the boy’s bathroom.

During this most secret of meetings, they recognized how their throats had become too hoarse to yell at it anymore, and if they tried to, they’d be caught and punished by their teacher.

“I have another idea,” said Carlo, as they huddled over the ball once more, the thread a bit longer than before and a puddle of water wetting it a bit.

“Yelling at the thing won’t work,” he said, his eyebrows mysteriously raised.

“But what about the yarn-makers?” said Dickie. “They have to pay for all those years of treachery.”

“I have a better idea.”

Soon thereafter, the four of them sat crossed-legged on the damp tile of the bathroom floor, their bottoms wet with sink water. They sat in a circle and put the ball of yarn in the center of the circle.

“We have to look at it differently,” said Carlo.

He told the group to stare at the ball as though it were a fixed point on a wall. The plan required time and silence, and his idea was that the ball would mysteriously roll itself up into perfection once again but only if they contemplated its repair with an intensity that outdid their angry yelling and criticism. So they sat in silence for several minutes, their stares fixed and intense as though nothing could distract or divert their attentions from the yarn. But after several minutes of staring, their nerves on edge for fear of getting caught by their teacher, Colin broke the watery silence with what may have been a more reasonable approach.

“The damn thing just won’t repair itself,” he said.

“Let’s give it more time,” insisted Carlo.

“We don’t have time,” he countered. “It’s almost time for lunch, and we haven’t even done our alphabets yet. We have to try something else.”

“What should we do?” asked Geo pleadingly, his eyes welling up with tears.

“This is no time to cry,” said Dickie. “I think you should march down to those scummy yarn-makers downtown and make a stink about it.”

“Just wait a minute,” said Colin. “I think we should compromise with it. I think we should shoot straight through the middle of it. We obviously can’t yell at it, and staring at it only makes unravel more. We have to blend the two extremes and take the middle path to show that we are undivided and unified in our efforts to have the sucker fix itself.”

The two friends who had already had their turn grunted skeptically at Colin’s new idea, as they both thought that with a little more time and coaxing, their methods would work. But they soon relinquished their powers to the more sensible boy who seemed the most reasonable.

They all joined hands and stood over the blue ball of yarn, and to implement the fusion of the first two methods, they stared at the ball and tried to appease it with soothing and healing words, thereby trying to get the dangling thread to reattach itself to the greater whole. Each boy took a turn appeasing it and praising it, but again time was running out and so was their patience.

“Damn,” said Colin. “I was sure this would work. I guess all that’s left is to confront the yarn-makers and tell them to repair it.”

“I don’t think we were at a hightened level of consciousness and awareness to stare at it and hope it would fix itself,” said Carlo. “Only the masters can do that.”

“Be strong and firm when you take it there,” said Dickie. “They can’t get away with this. I would go down there with you, but I can’t be late for dinner.”

“Yeah. I guess I’ll have to go to the yarn-makers myself,” said Geo resignedly. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s just one darn thread, but how horrible!”

His three friends consoled him for a little while, and they gave him the confidence to carry on. They left the bathroom as quietly as they sneaked into it and joined the rest of their classmates a bit saddened and depressed that their efforts had come up empty.

Yet this sadness that Geo held deep inside of him slowly transmogrified into anger towards those who had manufactured the yarn. Dickie even passed him secret notes in code and provided him with the intelligence needed to thwart the yarn-makers. Dickie was very straightforward about what he must do, and he wished he were going along with him, but Geo knew better that some tasks ought to be handled alone. By the time their teacher opened the door to the courtyard and let the students race in glee towards the line of yellow school buses parked along the street, Geo’s anger had reached its boiling point, mostly due to how Dickie listed all of the atrocities committed by the yarn-makers through the ages, and this, it turned out, motivated Geo to meet with the public.

Geo was neither polite nor delicate about refusing a bus ride home. Straight out of the gate like an Arabian steed, he marched from the school’s courtyard to the thick of the larger suburb where squat, concrete office buildings blanched against the small shrubs and fallen trees that served as attempts to beautify what little of the city’s natural environment remained. He must have marched for a good twenty minutes or so – his legs quickening, his heart beating out of his chest, and all the while he held the intense anger of someone who had experienced the worst kind of injustice.

Before he left the school, he had removed the yarn from his lunch box and had thrown it in the garbage. He saved the ball, however, as it now bulged out of his pants pocket like an awkward tumor. It caused passersby to gawk and stare at the little boy’s deformity as he marched down the avenue. He promised to take no prisoners, and the madness would only end when justice was rightfully served.

Geo entered a glass building that had been tinted to block out the sun. It was cool inside as a blast of conditioned air swept over his red hot face. In front of an office door sat a female receptionist. She was a senior citizen and had the look of a demure librarian. Her hair was curly-gray, and she wore spectacles that had slipped down the bridge of her nose. She smiled sweetly and asked what he wanted while also offering him a Tootsie Roll.

“I don’t want any candy,” said Geo, trying to contain his anger. “I want to see the manager.”

“Why on earth do you want to see the manager? And what do you have there in your pocket?”

“I’d rather explain that to the manager myself.”

“Don’t you want a Tootsie Roll?”

“No!”

The receptionist sighed at the sight of him, as she must have found him quite adorable. She thought he was sent for a school project or a research paper, and she sympathized with his wanting to get it in on time.

“My God,” she said, “it’s amazing how hard they make it for handsome little boys these days. I tell you what, dear, you just wait right there, and I’ll get the manager for you. You’re really a special little boy to be doing your project about our fine selection of yarn – straight off the sheep’s back, as we say.”

She couldn’t see it, but the top of the boy’s head might as well have been fuming. He hated being treated like a little boy when so much was at stake.

When the receptionist returned, he was told to enter the office behind her, which he did. But when he went inside, the office was blanketed in shadow. The dark outline of a larger figure sat at a desk with his hands clasped in front of him. Behind the solemn figure, several rectangles of sunlight escaped through closed blinds. The boy could barely see the man, but there was enough light available to notice that he wore a black suit and that his face was as cold and bloodless as a stone. The boys anger drifted off somewhere, and a chilling fear crept up his arms and legs. Apparently, the nice old receptionist was merely a front for the sinister darkness of this inner sanctum.

“Well, well, well,” said the manager, his voice deep and commanding. “They send me a small boy to do a man’s work.”

The boy’s fear had elevated to such a degree that he wanted to bolt from the room, but he had heard his teacher say that many great men often faced their fears instead of cowering before them. And with whatever courage he had, he pulled the blue ball of yarn out his pocket and placed it where one of the rectangles of sunlight exposed the hardness of the manager’s desk.

“This needs to be fixed,” Geo stammered. “And from what I know, you are the one responsible for it. I need this fixed right away.”

The manager’s face cut into the light, and the boy’s heart jumped at the sight of him. His coal black eyes looked directly into his, and his mouth wore a frown so grave, that he might as well have been staring into the Grim Reaper himself.

“Oh, how cute,” scowled the manager. “One of our balls of yarn.”

The manager inspected it for a moment and said,

“I see nothing wrong with it.”

He then threw it back at him. The ball hit Geo’s forehead and fell to the floor, but he courageously retrieved it and shoved it into the light once more.

“You see this?” stammered the boy. “This thread is loose, and your yarn is unraveling. It’s a defective product, and you are responsible.”

“What was that, boy? Come again?”

“You heard me. You need to fix it.”

The manager leaned back in his chair, his stone-cold face receding into the darkness of the room.

“I guess we have a problem, then, don’t we. Do you know how many times some sorry sucker like yourself comes into this office begging on their hands and knees for us to repair their stupid ball of yarn? It happens over and over again – a flood of little pricks like you every eight years – and do you know what I tell them each and every time? I’ll say the same thing to you, and you better listen good.

“You wanna take a piece of this company? You wanna piece of me?” he started yelling, “well, put your money where your mouth is! We hire the fiercest and the most bug-up-your-ass corporate lawyers in the world. We get ‘em all from the cream of the crop – Harvard Law, Yale Law, Columbia Law – and we train them from birth to go after little shitheads like you, and when they do get a hold of you, they’ll not only shake you down but your entire family as well. They’ll take your house, your tricycle, and the shirt off your skinny back. You’ll be left with nothing, nothing you hear me! Nada. You’ll have to pick up coal off the street just to get by, and guess what? Even Santa Claus won’t save you, because there is no Santa Claus, and there never was one. You won’t have a pot to piss in after we’re through - so go ahead – call your friendly lawyers and slap us with a lawsuit if you want your tiny little balls to take a pounding, because we eat people like you up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!”

Geo was so shocked that he wet himself on the spot. His grabbed his ball of yarn off the desk and fled the manager’s office, running from the receptionist who merely hummed a tune and filed her nails as he fled. He ran out into the hot sunshine, the dangling thread starting to coil. It had grown longer, and the clamminess of his hands only dampened and flattened it even more.