Eastern Standard Tribe | Page 5

the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It's a
morality play, and the first character is about to take the stage. He's a foil for the theme,
so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:
2.
Art Berry was born to argue.
There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they are the stuff of
legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas, confectionery girls
whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as the tripwire and poison on
which the assassins are reared. There are children born to practice medicine or law;
children born to serve their nations and die heroically in the noble tradition of their
forebears; children born to tread the boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on
the racetrack.
Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of the innumerable
doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, and his attention span is
already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream -- which is fast becoming a
nightmare -- he is bored silly.
The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toy blocks.
Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be a hell of a lot of fun, if

someone hadn't lost them all.
Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. They confer briefly,
then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extruding into the third dimension,
turning into a stack of blocks.
Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge that older
people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars and elevators and shoelaces.
Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the
blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are revealed,
each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a plane seemed easy
enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a while en route to New
York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge fell away. By the age of five, he
was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every
rule, arguing the morals and reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was
picking on gave up and swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.
In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to church with his
Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and the clergy arguing with
him in teams and relays.
It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?" But the
nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, and the argument spread
like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the priest decided to squash the
whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered philosophical word games from
Descartes in which the objective truth of reality is used to prove the beneficence of God
and vice-versa, and culminates with "I think therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even
managed to work it into the thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill
little voice answered from within the congregation.
Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairly tricksy
riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to use those same
arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the necessary nonexistence
of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home then, but the priest -- who'd
watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis and recognized a natural when he saw one --
called him to the pulpit, whence Art took on the entire congregation, singly and in
bunches, as they assailed his reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that
they blundered into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father Ferlenghetti laughed and
clarified the points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthed rhetorical
amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his thing. Not much
was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still the Communion to be
administered, but God knew it had been a long time since the congregation was engaged
so thoroughly with coming to grips with God and what their faith meant.
Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-lipped Gran, Father
Ferlenghetti made a point of warmly embracing her and telling her that Art was welcome

at his pulpit any time, and suggested a