Thoughts on an Odd Ball

Thoughts on an Odd Ball Seth Archer On my desk sits a magic eight bau that wül answer any question I ask of it. It looks just Uke the black eight baU from the game ofpool, except it's maybe thirty percent bigger, and plastic. When not in use, the baU sits on its Uttle window, through which the answer to my question Ues. If I turn the ball upside-down and look through the window, I'U see that answer on one face ofa multi-sided die. The die floats in a mysterious deep-blue-colored Uquid . In my two years ofUving with the magic eight ball, I have counted twenty possible answers, aU variations of"yes," "no," and "try again." But there could be more than what I have seen. Strange things have passed before my eyes. The baU was not reaUy given to me. It originaUy belonged to a coUege friend of mine with a fabulous name, Eudoxia Alexandra Papachristos. Eudoxia and I had a class together my senior year. Once in a while, after class, I would go over to her dorm room and ask the baU a question or two. It sat on the edge of her desk. I became quite fond of it. Now, I had this old bicycle that I'd found in the ceUar of the house my friends and I were renting. We caUed it "The Carrot."The thing barely went like a bicycle would be expected to go, but I loved it. The Carrot came to play a role. Every single bike on campus was securely locked to something large and immovable because of a notorious theft ring in our smaU coUege town inVirginia. The thefts made me furious. I decided to makeThe Carrot a sacrificial lamb: I decided never to lock it up. Were the bike taken, so be it. But in the meantime, people would see it, unlocked and free. And I would make it as hard for a thiefas I could: I began to park the orange bicycle right in the middle of the sidewalk, or, if I was in class, right in front of the door of the classroom buüding. My roommate KeUer hated it when I did that. Whenever The Carrot was blocking the way into a building he needed to enter, he would take it and put it on something high up and/or inaccessible, so that I'd have to make an effort to get to it: on a nearby roof, 145 146Fourth Genre in a tree, upside down on a raiUng. Once, KeUer hung it from the flagpole. In the end, he helped make The Carrot even more resistant to theft by drawing so much attention to it. It was teamwork of a sort. One day I got The Carrot out ofthe ceUar to take me to work. I noticed a rectangular sign—made from a white bedsheet, I presumed—hanging from the handlebars with big black letters that read "Work In Progress." KeUer's whimsy, I was certain ofit. We never talked about what the sign meant, but we reveled in the interpretations students and pedestrians would offer. And with "Work in Progress," I loved The Carrot even more. Most people hated that bike. Eudoxia did too, initiaUy. But after a few months of exposure to The Carrot, she came to admire it. One day she asked me if she could borrow it for a week. I said, "Sure, if I can borrow your magic eight baU." For a week, I walked to class and to work. At home, I asked the eight ball a lot of questions. Nothing too heavy. I feared asking anything for which an answer might actuaUy matter. I saw Eudoxia racing across campus on The Carrot a few times, and that made me very happy. At the end of the week, I saw The Carrot parked in front of the reUgion department; the seat was stabbing through a note from Eudoxia. In it, she thanked me for the bike and wrote a poem that told of a disturbing dream she'd had, in which I was riding too fast on a busy road and...