Cheeseburger Subversive (10 page)

“I'm glad the fire happened,” Benjamin confided to me. “I hated going to that school. But I'm sure glad I met you, Dak.”

After we returned to our usual, everyday, readin'-writin'-and-'rithmatic classrooms, we saw each other less frequently — perhaps for one weekend every two months. Getting permission from my parents for even this limited contact required a great deal of whining and brooding since Benjamin's house was some distance from our own, and also since his parents didn't seem to make much of an impression on my own mom and dad.

We usually opted for Benjamin's house, because his parents were more permissive about our experiments and expeditions than mine. In fact, Benjamin's mom and dad were often pleasantly absent for entire afternoons, unlike my own parents, who hovered over us like surveillance helicopters every time Benjamin came to visit. There was, of course, a rather damning correlation between Benjamin's presence and the number of physically altered household implements which surfaced afterwards. I never worried much about the little accidents that occasionally accompanied our projects, though; compared with the greater rewards of scientific exploration, they were small sacrifices indeed.

The first time Benjamin invited me to sleep over at his house, he was busy planning an underground space station. I often made such plans myself, which would usually hang on the refrigerator for a few weeks before migrating into a trash bag to make room for plans of even greater proportion. Benjamin's plans, however, were not just amusements, nor were they simply boyhood fantasies. When Benjamin made a plan, it was meant to be carried out. Benjamin's imagination was much less gaseous than my own.

Benjamin didn't have much choice in the matter; he was convinced that aliens, who lived on the other side of the universe, were communicating with him. The aliens are coming to Earth, and they sent specific telepathic instructions so that things will be in order when they arrive.

“How come they don't communicate with me, Benjamin?” I asked him.

“You're just a normal human, Dak,” was his reply. “You may have been chosen for that gifted class, but you haven't got a brain like mine. I'm different. The aliens have told me so. They need me. Their world can't survive without me, and I have to get ready for them to come and take me away from here soon. You can help me build the underground receiving station for when they come, but I'm the only one that can go with them.”

At this point, he had already started to march purposefully towards his father's tool shed.

“What are you talking about, Benjamin?” I asked him. This was a question I had become quite accustomed to asking.

He sighed and rolled his eyes the way he always did when he felt he was dealing with a lesser human, one incapable of fully understanding his purposeful schemes.

“They're underground dwellers, see,” he would explain. “So we'll have to build a reception station for them beneath the ground. We'll feed them orange juice and nectarines because they subsist mostly on vitamin C. Their matter-transporting device will materialize inside our station and they'll take me away with them so I can save their world. I am the Chosen One. They have told me this. They need me.”

I have never been one to interfere with the imaginings of others, so I played along.

“Oh, I see. Can I help?”

“Of course, you can help! Do you think building an underground base is easy work for just one guy?”

With shovels as tall as ourselves and with all the strength we could summon from our skinny little bodies, we proceeded to dig a hole in Benjamin's parents' backyard, a hole which would eventually become his subterranean alien friendship centre, his extraterrestrial welcome wagon. By nightfall, the hole was just big enough for Benjamin and I to lie down in — for some reason, this was important.

“Perfect,” said Benjamin. “This is exactly the size they want. Tomorrow we can lay the boards across and put the grass back on top. No stupid adults will ever know the difference. The aliens will come and go. I'll be gone before my parents even notice.”

All of that digging made us quite hungry, so we searched through the Cranstons' rather dark bungalow, looking for Benjamin's mother. We found her sitting on the floor behind the basement bar. Tributaries of eyeliner were drying on her cheeks, and I knew that there was something very wrong. I knew that I should have called my parents right then and got them to come and take me home, but I feared that if I did, I would probably never see Benjamin again. Half the books I had read up to this point in my life stressed the importance of loyalty to friends. I kept my mouth shut.

”Hey, Mom, this is Dak, my buddy from the old Gifted School. Will you make us some supper?”

His Mom looked up at us. She seemed to have dark circles under her eyes, like a raccoon, but it was difficult to see clearly in the dim basement light.

“Get something from the fridge, will you honey?” she said. The tone of her voice made me shiver, but again I resisted the urge to run to the phone and call home. I would stick by my friend.

“Okay, Mom,” said Benjamin, and we scuttled off towards the stairs.

“What's the matter with your mother?” I asked, rather meekly.

“Oh, nothing, she just likes to sit back there behind the bar, that's all. It's her special place, where she gets away. It's nothing.”

His mother called out to us as we scampered through to the kitchen.

“Boys! Try to be quiet, okay? Benjamin's Daddy isn't, um, feeling very well.”

There wasn't much worth eating in the fridge, so we raided the pantry instead. We tiptoed up the stairs to the attic where Benjamin liked to sleep — his bedroom was usually too cluttered to be slept in anyway. We spread our supper of potato chips, cola, Twinkies, chocolate pudding, and peanut butter out on the floor in front of us. I was going to bring along some nectarines, but Benjamin reminded me that those were for the aliens.

As Benjamin changed into his pyjamas, I noticed a large, purple-brown bruise in the center of his chest.

“Hey, Benjamin, what happened to you?”

“What? What do you mean? Oh, the bruise. Um, well, one of my inventions malfunctioned, that's all. I was building a spring-loaded rock-cannon, and it accidentally went off.”

“Wow! You built a rock-cannon? Can I see it?”

Benjamin suddenly became angry, the way he sometimes did when one of the other kids in his neighbourhood showed up to see if he wanted to come out and play. Benjamin had no use for little minds, or for people who couldn't understand the immensity of his life's purpose. Couldn't they see that he had more important things to do, and that he was preparing for a great journey into the unknown?

“No!” he barked at me. “No, you can't see the damn rock-cannon, okay! I told, you, it's malfunctioning! It doesn't work! Are you deaf or something?”

“Geeze, take it easy!” I replied, a little frightened at his outburst, but also a bit perturbed.

“I'm gonna go home if you're gonna start acting like a jerk!”

His behaviour quickly changed.

“No, no — don't go home. Don't leave. I'm sorry. I need you to help me finish the station. It has to be completed or the aliens will have no place to transport to. I'm sorry I yelled at you . . . ”

He now sounded as if he might start crying.

“Forget about it,” I mumbled. Sometimes Benjamin could be a difficult character to understand.

I didn't sleep very well that night. I kept having strange nightmares, nightmares with no pictures, only sound. I imagined that I was hearing muffled sounds of anguish crying, hollering, things breaking. I dreamt that these things were going on beneath me, maybe two or three floors down. A couple of times, the dreams were so real that I thought I could hear the sounds continuing after I was awake. I was so frightened, I may have even cried a little. I kept telling myself, you're only dreaming, none of this is really happening — hell is not breaking loose downstairs.

“How was your sleep-over, Honey?” Mom asked when I returned home.

“Fun!” I gushed. “We played a lot. Benjamin's got cool toys. And his mom is a really great cook!”

I felt a little guilty lying to my mom like that, but I knew that she would never allow me to visit Benjamin again if I let on that his household was so much different than our own.

I didn't see Benjamin for three months, although I talked to him on the phone quite often. He was making good progress in equipping the interior of his underground station. He had even gone so far as to smuggle a portable electric heater from the house to the station. He had also taken to sleeping outside beneath the ground, since the aliens had informed him that they might decide to come get him during the night. Logically, the aliens thought that it would be less dangerous if their rendezvous with Benjamin occurred during the night.

The next time I visited him, we went to bed early. Although I wasn't particularly keen on the idea, Benjamin insisted that we sleep outside in his underground fort, beneath the boards and sod and grass. He had brought out extra blankets and rations to make my stay as comfortable as possible, but I must admit that lying in the dirt under the ground in somebody else's backyard is not the most restful situation. I was afraid that the whole thing might collapse on us.

Benjamin slept soundly, curled up in a tight ball with his fingers in his mouth. When his alarm clock sounded at 3:00 o'clock, I was still fully awake.

“Come on!” he whispered excitedly. “We've got an important mission to accomplish tonight!”

Even with the flashlight, the tiny space in the ground was still dark. We struggled into our clothes and emerged into the cool, moonlit night. Our surroundings actually seemed bright in comparison with the black void in which we had spent most of the night. With my eyes fully adapted to the darkness, there was no mistaking that Benjamin removed a very large can of gasoline from bushes at the far side of the backyard lawn.

“What are we doing, Benjamin?” I was afraid to hear his answer, but also partly exited.

“The aliens have been having a hard time finding me, Dak,” he whispered. “Their scanners have been scrambled by certain particles in our upper atmosphere, and they haven't been able to locate my underground base, yet.”

“But what are we going to do with the gas, Benjamin?”

“They're going to try to locate me visually. I'm going to write my name in fire so they can see where I am through their telescopes.”

I was no longer enthusiastic about any of this. I was only afraid. I tried to think of a reason to stop him.

“Um, do you think the light from fire will be strong enough to be seen all the way across the galaxy? Probably not, eh?”

It was the best deterrent I could think of under the circumstances.

Benjamin began pouring gasoline on the ground. A wet letter “B” was already starting to soak into the earth before he bothered to answer my question.

“Are you stupid or something, Dak? Their telescopes are at least a thousand times more powerful and a million times more accurate than our junky little Earth telescopes. And just in case you've forgotten, the aliens live on the other side of the universe, not the galaxy. If it were just the galaxy, I'd be long gone by now.”

Having spelled out his name in such a way that it covered almost the entire backyard, Benjamin removed a book of dime-store matches from his back pocket and struck one on the outside cover.

“Besides, I have to use fire — the aliens' spectrographic analyzers are specifically calibrated to detect the light spectrum of gasoline fire in an oxygen-based atmosphere. So relax!”

He dropped the match at the base of the last letter “N.”

“Well, I guess this is it, Dak. By tomorrow night, I'll be a million light-years from this stupid planet.”

The match flickered for a moment, then with a surprising roar, the entire word burst into flame, and Benjamin's name illuminated everything around it. For a moment I was lulled — hypnotized by the allure of dancing fire.

Then, panic. Sheer panic. The flames that formed the word “BENJAMIN” began to spread. An appendage of the letter “E” advanced up the trunk of a tree. Another limb of flame swatted at the tool shed. Another licked at the wooden fence and still another crawled along the row of hedges. Within seconds, the entire yard was engulfed in an orange roar. Benjamin's name became indistinguishable from the rage that flashed all around us.

We ran screaming into the house.

“Mom! Mom! Mom!” Benjamin hollered. It was the first time I had ever seen Benjamin in tears.

His mother emerged from the basement, still slit-eyed from interrupted sleep. The glow from the backyard flickered on her face for a moment before she realized what was happening.

“Oh my God,” she muttered, as she slid sideways towards the telephone.

“Oh my God!” she began to scream. “Oh my God!”

Benjamin's father appeared from upstairs.

“What the hell is all the racket . . . ?”

Benjamin began to sob.

“I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

His father walked directly to where Benjamin stood, and looked him straight in the face, unblinking, nostrils flared.

“Did you do this?” his father whispered.

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry,” Benjamin whispered back.

His father raised a huge fist into the air.

Benjamin began to shriek.

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry!

With a swift, downward swing, the hovering fist slammed against the side of Benjamin's face, sending him spiralling to the floor.

Screaming those nightmare screams I had heard on an earlier night, Benjamin's mother ran towards him where he lay, quiet and motionless. She never got there because she was met halfway by her husband's fist. There was a loud crack, like the sound of a hammer whacking a board, and Benjamin's mother hit the floor.