Heart of Roundness

There's a passage in Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness in which the protagonist, Marlow, is riding a boat slowly up an unnamed river resembling the Congo, heading deep into the interior of the jungle toward the compound of one Mr. Kurtz, an ivory agent who is thought to be unwell. The compound comes into view, surrounded by a ring of poles, each with some sort of knob on the top. Marlow sees through his telescope that the knobs are heads.

I won't say that I got quite such a nasty surprise this morning. But I went onto my front porch in the semidarkness to put some bottles in the recycling box, and looked up and there it was: a large red plastic ball. Just sitting there, as if it were watching me.

I didn't touch it. I went back into the house. My first thought was of a show from the Sixties called The Prisoner, about a secret agent who tries to resign and is subsequently imprisoned in a sinister holiday resort. If anyone tries to escape, a large, soft ball chases and envelops the fugitive. I saw this in elementary school and it taught me to be wary of large round objects out and about by themselves, without a chaperone.

And what's more, if I've learned one thing from the thousands of movies I've seen in my life, it's that prudent people consider objects associated with childhood and innocence to be demonically possessed until proven otherwise. A ball that watches your house in the predawn gloom is probably not a ball that means you any good. It's a devil ball. You don't go up and touch such things. That's a one-way ticket to being the first victim. You leave the damned thing alone, get a phone book, and find an exorcist.

The ball was still there when I left the house. The day has been windy, and I sincerely hope it's gone when I get back. There's an elementary school across the street; let it go there. All I care about is that I don't have its brooding presence outside my house forevermore. I have enough trouble without that.