There Is No Ball To Watch
A short story to end the year
Editor’s Note: The following strange bit of text was found in the recesses of an external hard drive that I found lying on a sidewalk in my master-planned community. In all honesty, it strikes me as the ravings of a madman. I can’t tell you what it means. I can only say that I found it timely. There is no other good reason to share it here beyond the fact that the timestamp on the file indicates that it was created earlier this morning.
People will ask me: “Will you watch the ball drop?”
“No,” I tell them and try leave it at that.
They think something is wrong, so I, to relive the tension, add: “There is no ball to watch.”
They are confused. I relieve no tension. Surely there is a massive glowing sphere impaled on a magnificent metal antenna in Times Square. Undoubtedly, there will be thousands upon thousands cramming into that tiny square. And we know now that there will be just as many cameras. Every person is both a camera and screen, a reflector and reflected. There are dozens of security cameras there, too, I am sure, beady black orbs wedged into corners and hung from posts. There will be “official” cameras sent at the directive of ancient news stations and rising podcasts. There will be drones buzzing over that enormous mass of a crowd. There will be satellites in space, I am sure, snapshotting that glowing ember of a city block as the year passes.
People will relate all this to me, and still I will insist, “There is no ball to watch.” Many will walk away at that point. The patient and kind will stay for a while to try to flush out my derangement. But they, too, will eventually depart. Only the argumentative, those people whom I admire and adore, will begin to press me in their annoyance.
“Why are you sour? If we strapped you to that awesome orb, you would feel it drop. Come now. Be like us. Watch the ball drop.”
They hand me a phone. I look at the screen. It has a talking head in the foreground, a ball on a spire in the background, and a timer in the upper right-hand corner.
“The ball hasn’t dropped in many years,” I say, as if air is being squeezed from my being by some gigantic hand that envelopes my whole body save my head. I hate to bear this news.
“Look,” the most aggressive of the lot says to me, “a compilation of the ball dropping over the past 30 years.” It’s a video. I watch the montage. I have no choice. There’s Carson Daly and Beyoncé and Kimmel and Fallon and the orb spewing rays of light through an infinity of confetti.
“Every year we do the same thing,” the aggressor says. “If there is no ball to watch, what would you say we’re doing?”
The big hand squeezes me again. I am a human bellows. The flame grows.
“You watch nothing,” I wheeze and then inhale. I’m dying. I can feel it.
“You gaze into a void,” I wheeze again. These people don’t realize they’re killing me.
After I die, they strap my body to the ball, as in all fairness they said they would. The big hand that squeezed me, that King Kong palm, puts me there. They put all of us there, those who deny The Ball. We are just tiny blemishes, impossible to see at a distance.
Justin Bonanno is a writer and assistant professor. He wishes you a happy new year. He won’t be watching the ball drop this evening, but that is neither here nor there.