First Contact (14 page)

I
N FACT THE
P
ROFESSOR
was not thinking about any of this. Since the universe was going to end, the issue, which was not the sort of thing that resonated with him to begin with, seemed particularly unimportant. He could not see any point to going down in history for anything. What he was thinking, as he had been thinking throughout the entire conversation, was that he would like to have a piece of pie.

This is how it often is with celebrity: some people choose it, while others have it thrust upon them.

T
HE
A
MBASSADOR NEGLECTED, WHEN
he presented the moist Bundt, to inform the President that the cake contained a chemical substance that temporarily suppressed the expression of certain genes. Specifically, it suppressed the expression of the genes that coded for characteristics such as ambition and ego, which incline a human being to believe life has a greater purpose, and that this purpose somehow involves him.

None of the guests at the dinner knew this, of course. They just knew it was particularly good cake, so good as to border on addictive. For Ralph, the cake evoked pleasant memories of college brownies, and he wondered whether this cake had been prepared in a similar fashion. This would have been fine with him.

“This is particularly good cake,” the President said, his mouth half full.

“I am glad you like it,” the Ambassador said. “Please enjoy.”

What followed is known in certain countercultural movements as a moment—or moments—of lucidity.

F
OR EXAMPLE
, D
AVID
P
RINCE
realized his life had gone astray. He had been seduced from academia into politics by the allure of power and the grand hope of effecting social change. But he saw in his altered state that none of these things mattered. Life was ephemeral, far too short to worry about line items in the federal budget. What mattered was to find satisfaction in one’s life in whatever way possible. For David, that had been teaching and research. He resolved in that moment to return to his passion, his magnum opus, the definitive biography of President Millard Fillmore.

A
T THE SAME MOMENT
,
Ralph Bailey doubted the path of his own life. He had sat in the Chinese restaurant and questioned Jessica about her decision to leave law school. That had been a projection of his own anxiety about accomplishment and prestige. In fact he envied the freedom of Jessica’s spirit. In further fact, the happiest moment of his own life had been when he forgot about convention and responsibility and audaciously proposed to Jessica that they camp out on the carpet of the Oval Office on their very first date. He longed to see her and to recapture the carefree spirit of that evening.

He also realized he liked Chinese food more than he cared to admit and should eat it more often.

L
EN
C
ARLSON REALIZED HE
had been petulant and unprincipled in his politics, and should give Woody Allen a second chance.

T
HE
P
RESIDENT OF THE
United States felt strangely empty, not entirely unlike a man who has fallen out of love. He remembers the fact that he was in love, and remembers that at one time he could not imagine life without this person, but cannot for the life of him remember why he felt this way in the first place. The President knew that not five minutes ago, God had been important, but now he could not say why. He could not even recall the sensation of faith. It struck the President as bizarre, perhaps even ironic, that this crisis
should occur while eating a delicious Bundt cake. All the same, he took stock of his own life. Looking at it with dispassion, the President concluded that his obsessive pursuit of success in politics had been a reaction to his father’s failure to give him attention. Looking at it with the same dispassion, the President further concluded that his father had been an asshole. He also noticed his underwear was feeling quite comfortable.

T
HE
F
IRST
L
ADY REALIZED
that the idealized image of the emaciated woman with enormous breasts was a social construct without validity. What was beautiful was whatever we perceived to be beautiful and whatever gave us pleasure. This realization emboldened the First Lady to have another piece of cake. This in turn solidified her hormone-free conclusion about the subjectivity of beauty, which in turn emboldened her to have one of the latkes. It was, depending upon one’s perspective, either a vicious or a virtuous cycle.

N
ED
A
NAT
-D
ENARIAN HAD HIS
own moment of lucidity. He realized that while he had devoted his life to reaching out to new worlds and making the lives of others better, he had neglected his own family. His son was growing up without him. He had placed too much of a burden on his wife. In short, he had been away for too long. It was time to go home.

Ned’s was a true epiphany. While the humans’ experience had epiphanic qualities, theirs was qualitatively different from Ned’s own. This was because the people of Earth and the people of Rigel-Rigel had quite different physiologies. The transformative compound in the cake had no known effect on Rigelians. In fact Ned ate it only because the gefilte fish had given him indigestion and he thought the Bundt might settle his stomach.

So his epiphany was spontaneous, a long time in the making but spontaneous. That it happened at the same time the humans experienced their cake-induced revelations could have been an example of the sort of convergent behavior people sometimes exhibit, such as when people who spend a lot of time around one another start to speak in the same manner. Or it might have just been a coincidence.

T
HESE WERE NOT THE
only epiphanies occurring at that moment in the universe.

S
TANLEY
S
MITHERS, THE DEPUTY
manager with responsibility for dried foods at the Kraft manufacturing plant in Worcester, Massachusetts, was having a very bad day. The machine that desiccated and granulated the cheese had broken a spring and sprayed powdered cheddar all over the factory floor, covering the employees in dried cheese and sending several home with severe irritation of their sinuses. It had taken more than six hours to repair the apparatus and in the process Stanley split the pants of his best suit, a Nino Cerutti, which he had just purchased at the Men’s Wholesale Outlet. The jacket was covered in cheese speckles.

It had been a very bad day indeed. But on his way out, Stanley’s spirits were buoyed, first by a coffee cake, which he bought from the vending machine, and then by a poster hanging on the wall by the time punch. It had been patterned on the World War II poster of Rosie the Riveter. It said:

Kraft Salutes Its Patriotic Employees

And under that:

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

The Presidential Dinner of Choice

In the dried-cheese food business, the hours could be brutal, and a short circuit in the granulator could dampen even the most resilient of spirits. Stanley was exhausted and at the end of his patience, but he was a great patriot, and he knew of the historic events transpiring in Washington. The notion that Stanley’s product might be served at the White House or might help sustain the President during a time of national need made all of it, even the pants-splitting granulator, seem worthwhile.

A
T
L
AKE
H
OUSE, HIS
home in Wiltshire, England, Sting found himself at home for the evening with nothing to do—no tour, no album marinating in the studio, even the wife and kids were out for the evening. It was the kind of evening that invited quiet reflection. He built a fire, cut himself a slice of Sara Lee pound cake, and sat in his favorite chair by his favorite window. Looking out over the verdant countryside, he
thought about how much larger the universe had become over the past week. For a moment, he became anxious. Would there be in this new cosmos a place for the music of Sting? He took a bite of cake and wondered. Then, with a sudden sense of calm, he realized that the making of the music had been an end in itself.

P
ROFESSOR
C
RABTREE WAS OUT
at dinner with a group of fellow tort professors. For dessert, he ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of chocolate chip loaf cake. He sat and listened as his colleagues debated the minutiae of jurisprudence. For the first time, he saw the absurdity of it. Right then and there, he decided he had been wasting his life studying and teaching tort law. As of that day he would pursue his life’s dream: studying and teaching contract law.

A
T THE SAME TIME
as all of this, in a distant galaxy, on an as yet unmentioned planet not unlike Earth, a mother brought her son milk and cookies and sat down to read him a bedtime story. They were reading from a novel titled
First Contact—Or, It’s Later Than You Think (Parrot Sketch Excluded)
. In the book, aliens reach out to this planet called Earth with the best of intentions, but the President of the biggest nation on the planet is implausibly dim and screws everything up. Boy and mother had just reached the point in the novel where several people on Earth were eating dessert at more or less the same time and all thinking about the meaning of their lives. The boy did not like the book.

“I don’t like this book,” he said.

“It seems okay to me,” his mother replied. “I think it’s kind of funny.”

Of course, this conversation took place in the native language of this unnamed planet in the distant galaxy. What is set out here is simply the best translation available.

“The themes of the book are pedestrian and trite,” the boy said. “I think what the author is trying to say is that the desire to find meaning in things is just an evolved response that leads some species to work harder and accomplish things they otherwise would not. The belief in meaning is ultimately a fiction, and a potentially destructive one when people become too passionate about the myths in which they believe.”

This may seem like sophisticated speech for a two-year-old, but the boy was precocious.

“The author’s argument is internally contradictory,” he expounded. “By attempting to convince the humans that the search for meaning is destructive, the aliens are themselves buying into the search for meaning. If nothing means anything, what difference does it make whether people on some planet believe things matter and some others do not? So what if a planet destroys itself? It only matters if things matter. And of course all this is going on while the universe is about to end, so nothing really matters at all.”

The boy stopped and waved his hand. “It’s old existential stuff,” he said, “handled quite clumsily really. He bludgeons people over the head with all of it. And the exposition is heavy-handed. He might as well have one of the characters just come out and articulate the themes of the book.”

“I just thought he was trying to be funny,” the mother said. “I really like that the President is obsessed with his underwear.”

The boy paid his mother no heed and continued, more animated than he had been before. “The book has all kinds of contradictions,” he said. “For example, the people of Rigel-Rigel are capable of faster than light travel, but the Professor has an ancient washer and dryer and leaky pipes in the basement.”

“I thought the Professor’s basement was funny,” the mother said. “I liked that his wife circled the holes in his underwear.”

“The use of language is confusing,” the boy continued. “The aliens have a Bundt cake on their planet? How could that possibly be? And why in that chapter where he is talking about the Professor’s neighborhood does he translate Rashukabia as “Dutch”? That’s just a gratuitous shot against a perfectly nice people. You can’t translate a proper name.”

“He could be commenting on the ambiguity of language.”

“Sometimes he seems to be saying there is no meaning,” the boy continued. “At other points he suggests there is meaning. All of these coincidences occur, but they don’t lead anywhere.”

“Perhaps that’s intentional,” said the mother.

“What about the video of the Aurorans? How absurd is that? These aliens have the ability to travel to another planet and genetically modify a species, but they only have a handheld video camera.”

“Maybe they were making a home movie.”

“Why does Sting keep coming up? It’s so random. Is he really using him as a substitute for Jung? Is it really philosophy lite?”

“Well, everybody likes Sting,” said the mother.

“Sometimes stories are factual, sometimes they’re made up. Sometimes product names are real, sometimes they’re fake.”

“Perhaps there were legal issues.”

“And for God’s sake, from a literary standpoint, pick a main character. Is the book about Ralph and Jessica or the Anat-Denarians or the dim-witted president of the United States? As if anyone that dumb could get to be president of a country. And what does the subtitle, ‘Parrot Sketch Excluded,’ mean? At the very least, the title of a book should make some sense.”

The mother offered no further answers to her son’s questions. Rather she waited to see whether he had finished his rant. Children of her son’s age could get this way sometimes. On her planet, they referred to it as the “terrible twos.” When the child threw a fit, sometimes the parent simply had to let it go on until the child had expended its energy. Her son now appeared to be spent.

“Well, should we finish the book?” she asked in a gentle tone.

“I suppose,” her son said, calmer now. “It isn’t completely hopeless.” He gestured to his mother with his hand and said, “Read on.”

The mother said, “‘Well, should we finish the book?’”

The boy said, “I already said read on.”

“No,” said the mother. “That’s what it says in the book. It says, ‘“Well, should we finish the book?” she asked in a gentle tone.’ Now it says, ‘The boy said, “I already said read on.”’ The text is changing as we speak. The punctuation is very confusing.”

She looked up. “That’s what it says in the book.”

“They’re called recursively nested quotation marks,” the boy said.

“Now it says, ‘They’re called recursively nested quotation marks.’” Her eyes showed concern. “Try saying something else,” she said.

The boy said, “I like macaroni and cheese.”