First Contact (6 page)

“I would get a beautiful woman to sit behind the desk and I would sit on this sofa and look at her all day.” Ralph pointed at her. “You would do quite nicely.”

“No, seriously, what would you do?”

“I am trying very hard not to be so serious.”

“Just for a moment.”

Ralph took a breath and exhaled. “If I were president of the United States,” he said, “I would place a tax on people who have too much.”

“Too much money?”

“No, just too much in general. You know, people like Tiger Woods. Here’s this guy who is good-looking, plays golf better than anyone else, and has a billion dollars. On top of all that, he marries this unbelievably beautiful Swedish woman. That’s too much.”

“So you’d tax him?”

“Yeah. I’d take away the girl and give her to a homely guy who couldn’t get a date. Tiger would still have plenty. It’s only fair.”

“And you think you could sell this to the public.”

“Absolutely. It would be much more popular than a monetary tax. Take Warren Buffet, for example. No one begrudges him what he has. Sure he’s worth fifty billion dollars, but he looks like Warren Buffet. So no one minds that he has so much money. It’s people like Tiger and Brad Pitt and George Clooney who the IRS should be hitting. If Jennifer Aniston arrived at your house instead of a rebate check, people would really start to buy into the tax code.”

“I like it, but I’m not sure the American people will buy it.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly.

“And what is that?”

“What I would do,” Jessica said, “is give every American a stuffed animal.”

“You mean like a teddy bear?”

“It doesn’t have to be a bear. It could be a lamb or a dog—just so long as it’s stuffed.”

“Why?” Ralph asked without any hint of skepticism. He expected her answer would warm his heart, which it did.

“People who grow up with stuffed animals are more gentle and caring,” Jessica explained. “They’re completely dependent on you, even more so than a real pet. A cat could do pretty well on its own, a dog can go feral and survive, but a stuffed pet has no life without its owner. Having responsibility for something powerless teaches you empathy.”

“What type of stuffed animal did you grow up with?” Ralph asked.

“I had a soft little porcupine.”

Ralph grinned, but Jessica cut him off. “Don’t you dare laugh! I would have died for Booda. I used to worry there would be a fire in my house. Booda would have been the first and only thing I took on my way out. If need be, I would have risked my life to save him. The thought of him burning was unbearable to me. The world would be a better place if everyone thought of other people’s suffering in the same way.”

“I wasn’t about to laugh,” Ralph said. “I think what you said is nice.” So nice he wanted to go over to the Resolute and kiss her.

“I bet the President didn’t have a stuffed animal growing up.”

“I wouldn’t know. He has certainly never mentioned it to me.”

Jessica softened. “I bet you did, though. I bet you had a stuffed bunny rabbit.”

This woman was incredible. “You’re right, though I don’t know how you knew that,” Ralph said. “His name is Bun-Bun. He’s still with me.”

“Well, perhaps Bun-Bun can meet Booda someday.”

“I’m sure he would like that.”

T
HE
B
RITISH CLAIM THE
Teddy Bear took its name from King Edward VII, who went by Teddy, but every patriotic American knows the
real story is that Theodore Roosevelt, while bear hunting in Mississippi in 1902, spared the life of a cub whose mother had been killed during the hunt. The episode was depicted in a popular cartoon, which in turn inspired a store owner named Rose Michtrom to create a toy bear. She wrote the White House requesting permission to name the bear “Teddy,” permission President Roosevelt freely granted.

This was another of the many ways in which TR really got it, although it is impossible to imagine Roosevelt foresaw the massive proliferation of stuffed animals that would ensue over the following century, including bears, cats, dogs, snakes, alligators, rabbits, zebras, monkeys, birds, horses, several extinct species including dinosaurs of every kind, several species that never existed such as the unicorn, and, of course, not to be forgotten, the occasional, improbable porcupine.

“S
O WHAT ARE WE
going to do now?” Jessica asked.

“Are you getting antsy?”

“Well, a private tour of the White House and sitting behind the president’s desk is fine, but a girl likes to be impressed.”

Ralph had prepared for the moment. He pulled a large wicker basket from the closet. He spread a picnic blanket across the carpet and laid out china plates and two thin candles, which he lit with a lighter from his pocket.

“How does a Chinese food picnic in the Oval Office sound?”

“It sounds just wonderful,” Jessica said. She got up from the desk, walked over to the blanket, and sat down cross-legged. “What are we having?”

“General Tso’s Chicken.”

Jessica started to speak, but Ralph cut her off. “It’s vegetarian,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“I just guessed. I know how you tree-huggers are.”

He dished the food onto a plate. “Here,” he said. “Have some General Tso’s Lite.”

She took the plate. “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “If it’s made with tofu, is it still General Tso’s Chicken?”

“You mean is chicken an integral part of the dish?”

“Right. If it’s made with tofu, can it be General Tso’s Tofu or
tofu prepared in the style of General Tso or did General Tso only like chicken?”

“I don’t know. How do you get a food named after you anyway?”

“That’s a good question. How many people can you think of who do have foods named after them?”

“Napoleon has a pastry,” Ralph said.

“Julius Caesar has the Caesar salad.”

“I always thought that was Sid Caesar.”

“No, it was definitely Julius.”

I
N FACT IT WAS
the Italian-American restaurateur Caesar Cardini (1896–1956) who created the salad—sans anchovies—at his Tijuana restaurant in 1924. Cardini lived in San Diego, but ran the restaurant in Mexico to avoid Prohibition. As with every great invention, disputes have arisen over where the credit truly belongs. Among others, Cardini’s business partner, Cardini’s brother, and the mother of one of Cardini’s sous-chefs claim credit for the recipe, but the weight of historical evidence is with Cardini himself. Julius Caesar is almost certainly not involved, except as the inspiration for Mr. Cardini’s first name. Looking back, it is almost impossible to imagine Mr. Cardini could have foreseen the massive proliferation of Caesar salads, including salads topped with chicken, salmon, and fresh grilled tuna, and the explosion of salads generally, including the Waldorf salad, the Cobb salad, and the unfortunately named Watergate salad, a fruity mélange of pineapple, nuts, marshmallow, and whipped topping, which fell out of favor in the late seventies, but has enjoyed something of a renaissance of late, coinciding with the decision to turn the old hotel into condominiums.

“M
AY BE YOU HAVE TO
be a brutal tyrant to get a food named after you,” Jessica said.

“There is the Shirley Temple.”

“But that’s clearly the exception.”

“Or the exception proving the rule.”

“Just think of all the great people who never had a food named for them.”

“In that way,” Ralph said, “Sting may have hurt himself. It’s easy to imagine someone named Gordon getting a food named after
him—Chicken Gordon Bleu, for example. But it’s hard to imagine a food with Sting in the name—Shrimp Sting—it just doesn’t sound very elegant.”

“You know, there’s a
Simpsons
episode on this. Mr. Burns has takeout Chinese and he says something like, ‘General Tso, you may have been a ruthless tyrant, but you make a delicious bird.’”

Ralph’s heart skipped a beat. “You like
The Simpsons
?”

“I do,” she said with mock indignation. “I hope that isn’t a problem for you. I can deal with this whole working-for-a-Republican-president thing, but not liking
The Simpsons
would be a deal breaker.” She stood up theatrically.

“Oh no,” Ralph said, looking up. “I love
The Simpsons
. I was hoping you did too.”

Jessica sat back down. “Well,” she said, playful again. “If you like
The Simpsons
so much, then enough with this derivative banter.”

“The part about Sting was original.”

“Inadequate. The central thrust was the General Tso thing. That was derivative.”

“
The Simpsons
have covered just about every funny thing there is in the universe.”

“There’s a
South Park
episode to that effect. That’s a funny idea—that there’s nothing original to laugh about.”

J
ESSICA AND
R
ALPH DID
not and could not know about the Spinocoli, one of the most ancient species in the universe, a race of monkey-like creatures who, aside from occasional lemonade breaks, spend their waking hours typing compulsively and randomly. Over the eons, they have written everything imaginable, including
Hamlet
—twice—the
Koran
, and a comedy routine, beloved on the planet Rigel-Rigel, about a man who shot a moose.

“I
THINK EVERYTHING HAS
happened before,” Ralph said. “I think everything we experience has been experienced by someone else somewhere in the universe—every grief has been endured, every idea has been explored, every joke has been told.”

Ralph took a bite of food, chewed thoughtfully, and continued. “But that doesn’t make the experience any less meaningful to us. It doesn’t make the joke any less funny—just told, not unfunny. That people have experienced the same things before doesn’t diminish
the quality of our experience or our ability to enjoy life. The mistake is to pretend these things haven’t happened before, that we are somehow unique. That’s too arrogant. Really, it’s just a matter of perspective.”

Someone else might have found this speech a bit melodramatic or juvenile, but Jessica had fallen in love with Ralph, as he had fallen in love with her, and she hung on his every word.

“One thing I take from that is we should enjoy every moment to the maximum.”

“I agree with that in the abstract,” Ralph said, “but I haven’t practiced that principle. I worked too hard when I was in school, and I work too hard now. When you work at the White House, it becomes your entire universe, and everything in it seems profoundly important. Every day is like life and death. I never used to think of myself as being so serious, but working here I have a powerful sense of duty.”

“To get the President his lunch,” she said with a smirk.

“Exactly.”

“Well, how about just for tonight we act as if the world is going to end tomorrow?”

“It could happen,” Ralph said. “The aliens are lurking in orbit as we speak.”

“Don’t worry,” Jessica said. “They have good intentions.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just am.”

“Are you one of these people who thinks things always work out for the best?”

“Not always,” Jessica said, “but mostly.”

“I don’t understand that,” Ralph said.

“What’s not to understand?”

“Well, what evidence is there to suggest things always work out for the best?”

Jessica shrugged. “What evidence is there things work out for the worst?”

“I’m not sure that’s the only alternative,” Ralph said.

“Isn’t it?” asked Jessica.

Jessica reached across the blanket and touched him on the lips with her index finger. “How would the Secret Service feel about us making out on the President’s carpet?” she whispered.

Ralph gently kissed her lips. “I told you,” he whispered. “The pralines block video transmission.”

She started to sing softly.
“I think we’re alone now. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.”

“Tiffany?” he asked.

“Tommy James & the Shondells,” she said, and as night fell on the White House, Ralph and Jessica shared their first kiss.

P
ROFESSOR
J
OHN
F
ENDLE
-F
RINKLE’S EVENING
of research in theoretical physics began like most: by removing wet laundry from his desk. This had been a “socks and underwear” day in the Fendle-Frinkle household. The Professor moved aside six sets of undershorts and three pairs of soggy socks, including a particularly wet pair of hosiery Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle had placed directly on the yellow legal pad containing the Professor’s current calculations.

The Professor set the socks and underwear down on a small foldable tray table. This table had been designed and marketed as a place for people to rest their microwavable dinners while they watched television. In the Fendle-Frinkle household it was used exclusively as a place for the Professor to temporarily rest laundry while he contemplated the nature of the universe. Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle could have used the tray table in the same manner—thus sparing
the Professor’s papers some unnecessary smudging—but she chose to use the desk instead, leaving it to her husband to clear his work space. Earlier in the marriage, the Professor protested this practice, but he had long ago capitulated on such matters. In fact, when the Professor finished his work for the evening, he would return the socks and underwear to their original places on the desk.

Professor Fendle-Frinkle noticed some of his underwear contained holes, several of which were rather large. Professor Fendle-Frinkle noticed this because Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle had drawn rings around the holes with a pen. The Professor paid the ink circles little attention. Professor Fendle-Frinkle did not care much about socks, underwear, or any of the other quotidian details of life.

When he finished dealing with the laundry, the Professor sat down, at long last, at his desk. A black leotard hanging from the overhead clothesline dripped water onto his head, so he moved his chair to the right. In this position a second leotard—this one aquamarine—dripped water onto his head, so he moved the chair slightly to the left. Finally, he managed to find a narrow dry space between the soggy nylon bodysuits.

The Professor’s desk was situated between the Fendle-Frinkles’ washer and the Fendle-Frinkles’ dryer. There was no choice but to place the desk along the same wall as the washer and dryer; the basement was quite small to begin with and one wall was occupied by the boiler, another by a slop basin, and a third by a set of plastic bins containing Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle’s old shoes. It would have been possible, though, to put the desk to the left of the washer or to the right of the dryer. But the Professor’s wife insisted on keeping the desk between the two appliances. She found the space useful for transferring clothing.

Because the dryer vibrated when it ran and because the washing machine produced a high-pitch squeal during its spin cycle, the positioning of the desk led to further disruptions of the Professor’s work whenever his wife ran the washer or the dryer or, as was the case that evening, both.

When clearing clothing from his desk, the Professor sometimes wondered why his wife didn’t put the underwear in the dryer together with the other clothing. He had asked his wife about this once. She had offered an explanation, something about elastics, which he did not understand at the time and had long since forgot
ten. The Professor also wondered, from time to time, why his wife did not run the wash during the day, since she did not work and spent most of the day watching soap operas. He had asked her about this once too. For this his wife offered no explanation. The Professor suspected, correctly, it was a passive-aggressive way for his wife to express disapproval of his work and, perhaps more relevantly, him.

On top of everything else, the vibration of the dryer caused the lightbulb above the Professor’s head to flicker on and off. This single bulb, fastened to a socket hanging tenuously from the ceiling by a slender wire, was the sole source of light in the basement. Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle had steadfastly opposed the placement of a lamp in the cellar, saying it would disturb the aesthetic milieu. It would have been of no use anyway since there was but a single socket in the basement and it was fully engaged that evening by the washer and the voluble, vibrating dryer. So the Professor sat in intermittent periods of darkness, which sometimes lasted for no longer than an eye blink, but sometimes lasted for twenty or thirty seconds.

M
Y OWN WORK SPACE
is far more pleasant than the Professor’s. I have a quiet room at the top of my house with a big wooden table I use as a desk, a new computer with a flat-screen monitor, and two windows that offer excellent cross-ventilation. And I always have plenty of light. This is in part because of a special lamp I purchased to combat depression.

I am mostly a happy person, but I get down from time to time about politics and the environment and the general direction of things. I worry whether any of the enterprises to which I devote my time—like writing and teaching and bowling on Thursday nights—really make any difference. I think this metaphysical angst is quite typical of our times. It is arguably the defining characteristic of this generation. Just this morning I received an e-mail from one of my students, a very nice young man, asking me the meaning of life. I get these e-mails a lot.

For whatever my two cents is worth, I think the problem is affluence generally and, more specifically, having the time and money to watch television and movies. I mean, if you lived in ancient Sumer or during the Depression there just wouldn’t have been time to think about the meaning of life. You’d worry about how you were going to eat and provide for your family. I could be wrong, but I
don’t think farmers experience much metaphysical angst. I think at the end of the day they collapse into bed, too physically tired to think. But if you live in modern America—and are not a farmer—there is ample time for dangerous, destructive questions like “What does it all mean?”

Movies and television only make matters worse. They create the impression everyone is attractive and perky, everything happens for a reason, and, most insidiously, the expectation that every moment will be interesting and entertaining. In the movies things are constantly happening, conversation is snappy, and music is always playing in the background.

That’s not real life. Real life is eating a bowl of cereal by yourself before you go to bed or sitting in traffic on the way to your grandmother’s for Thanksgiving or waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these pursuits—they are certainly no worse than tilling the soil for twelve hours a day—but judged against the expectation of constant gratification and the illusion of grand purpose, they can seem quite unsatisfying. They certainly do to me.

One day a few years ago, in the back of an issue of
The New Yorker
, I saw advertised a special lamp designed to combat depression. I had heard of such lamps and the company (Swedish) seemed reputable enough since it advertised in
The New Yorker
, so I plunked down $225 plus shipping and handling for a Realite Full-Spectrum Lamp. It arrived three days later and looked nice enough, but more or less like a fluorescent lamp. I called the company and asked whether there had been some mistake. They said there was no mistake, research shows lamps of this sort are effective at combating depression, and I should give it a try. I did and still use it. It works pretty well, but I did get depressed for a few days over spending $225 on a fluorescent lamp.

N
EEDLESS TO SAY, THE
basement was not the ideal working environment for a theoretical physicist, and in fact there was other space available in the house. The Fendle-Frinkles had a small three-bedroom home. The husband and wife slept in the largest of these bedrooms, except on evenings when the Professor was required to sleep elsewhere because of his snoring, her insomnia, or her general dissatisfaction with him. The second bedroom was employed,
somewhat reasonably, as a guest bedroom. The use seemed a bit less reasonable when one considered the Fendle-Frinkles had not had a guest in eleven years, but the Professor was glad for the extra bed on the nights when his wife evicted him from the master bedroom.

The third bedroom was another matter entirely. The Fendle-Frinkles had no children so the room could easily have been used as an office. It was a converted attic, a minuscule room with a short ceiling on the top floor of the house. But though it was small, it had a window that looked out over a ledge where birds liked to perch and sun themselves, and a view of the single tree in their tiny backyard. The Professor, who liked birds very much, envisioned hanging a small feeder from the window. On a sunny day it would be a splendid place to have a sit and a look and a think. It would have made a fine office indeed.

In fact it was used as a yoga and oatmeal room. When the Professor had first lobbied to use the room as an office, many years ago, his wife insisted she required the room as a place to practice her yoga. She made a great show of converting the attic into a yoga studio, furnishing it with mats and candles and a proper drapery over the window, but to the Professor’s knowledge had never actually performed yoga in the room.

After three years or so of disuse for the Tantric arts, the Professor made the argument, in something of a lawyerly fashion, that the room had been abandoned for its stated purpose and he should be allowed to claim it as an office. His wife protested she had every intention of getting back to yoga and if he performed physics in the room, the feng shui of the space would be permanently spoiled.

The pretense she would return to the practice of yoga became difficult to maintain as several more years passed without exercise or contortion. So Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle thereafter contended she required the room for the proper storage of the whole-grain, macrobiotic oatmeal that had become the staple of her diet. She contended that a constant, particular level of humidity was required in order to maintain what she termed the “integrity” of the oatmeal. The Professor, one of the three or four smartest men in the universe, had never heard the concept of integrity applied to hot cereal. When he inquired as to its meaning, he was told he would not understand. But he capitulated, of course, and his wife went through an elaborate charade of installing a humidifier and a dehumidifier and a sensitive
monitor to maintain the proper moisture level at all times. So it was that the space the Professor coveted for his office became occupied by yoga mats, humidifiers, and macrobiotic oatmeal.

By the by, the Professor tried the oatmeal once and thought it tasted like sawdust. One time, in a puny act of revolt, the kind to which impotent husbands are reduced, the Professor secretly stored one of his wife’s canisters of oatmeal in their dank basement and later substituted it for the moisture-regulated attic-oatmeal without her knowledge. She ate it and made no mention of tasting any difference. The Professor tried it too and thought it tasted, just as before, like sawdust.

I
SHOULD PAUSE FOR
a moment to say I have taken the liberty here of translating certain terms for the convenience of the reader since the Fendle-Frinkles do not live on Earth. They live on the planet Rigel-Rigel, the very same planet that has just contacted Earth and is home to Maude and Ned Anat-Denarian. To be more specific, the Fendle-Frinkles live in the town of Chewelery in a small subdivision, which used to be okay until the Rashukabia got in. The Rashukabia are an ethnic subgroup that loosely translates as “Dutch.” It should be said the Rashukabia neither look, sound, nor act Dutch. It is simply the best translation available. The planet name Rigel-Rigel has been translated for these pages in a similarly imperfect fashion. The actual name contains six letters and three sounds that are not present in English.

Some of the translations, however, are better. For example, the Rigelian term for what I have referred to here as feng shui is also unpronounceable and unspellable in English, yet it corresponds to the art of arranging furniture to enhance the spiritual energy of a room. Its practice is associated, as on Earth, with the kind of people who worry about the environment and eat things like macrobiotic oatmeal. Through a remarkable coincidence, yoga is called yoga on Rigel-Rigel and its practice is largely similar to that on Earth. One popular position is called
Huinatulana
, which, loosely translated, means “downward facing dromedary.”

T
HE
P
ROFESSOR SAT DOWN
for his evening’s work between the squealing washer and the vibrating dryer, underneath the flickering lightbulb in, all things considered, a rather good mood. He had long ago
released his anger over matters such as the wet laundry on his desk and the oatmeal and yoga mats lying fallow in what should have been his office. He was just happy to have some free time to think about his research, which he loved, and his current project, which he found particularly engaging and which was, by any measure, quite important.

No sooner had he sat down than his wife began to scream from upstairs.

“John!” she screamed. “John!”

The lightbulb flickered off and she screamed his name again.

After years of living in the house, Mrs. Fendle-Frinkle knew screaming from across the house was an inefficient method of communication. Under normal circumstances it was difficult to hear someone two stories away; with the washer and dryer running it was virtually impossible. The Professor had explained this many times, but still his wife insisted on screaming from across the house.

“Hold on,” the Professor shouted, and he walked upstairs. His wife was sitting in bed watching television with the volume turned all the way up.

“What is it, Evelyn?”

“There’s no toilet paper upstairs,” she said without shifting her focus from the television set.

He could take the laundry on the desk and the shaking of the dryer, but the gross inefficiency of this drove the Professor crazy. If his wife needed toilet paper she could have walked down to the basement and gotten it herself. This would have been a total of two trips: one trip down and one trip up. The Professor, who had already walked up once, now had to walk down to get the toilet paper, back up again to put it in the bathroom, and back down to resume his work: a total of four trips. He muttered the whole way and made the mistake of mumbling the word “shrew” within earshot of his wife. Earshot should have been a radius of six inches or so since his wife had the television turned up so high, but Evelyn had extraordinary perception when it came to criticism of her. She turned down the volume of the television set and the Professor understood immediately he had made a mistake.