First Contact (22 page)

The President was worried about his Sudoku puzzle. He was beginning to suspect he had misplaced a 9 in the upper left-hand box and that this faulty premise, upon which his entire solution was based, would require him to redo the entire puzzle.

An aging chef at a fine London restaurant could not recall whether he had already seasoned his stew with paprika. He worried about the stew and his diminishing memory. Losing one’s memory can be a very disconcerting experience.

Both Sting and I were working on and worrying about the same Sudoku puzzle as the President. By coincidence, I had misplaced the same 9 as the President. Sting was solving the puzzle correctly, though he was bothered by his dinner, which seemed to have been seasoned too heavily with paprika.

On Rigel-Rigel, Professor Fendle-Frinkle was unwinding with a three-dimensional base–47 Sudoku puzzle. These could be ambitious undertakings, and he worried he might not finish before the end of the universe.

Also on Rigel-Rigel, the Ambassador worried about Earth and regretted how badly things had gone. Ned worried about the same thing. He also worried about his beloved Maude, who had taken the car out for the first time since the accident. Ned knew how crazy drivers could be.

Finally, back on Earth, aboard Air Force One, Ralph Bailey worried that his beloved Jessica would not get to Greenbrier in time.

C
OASTING DOWN THE HIGHWAY
,
Nelson Munt-Zoldarian was breathless with excitement. He had staged dozens of accidents in his career, but this one felt different. He recalled the anticipation he felt as a young man when he left the mob and struck out to blaze his own path of fraud. In those early days he would stay awake at night worrying about the details of his plan, whether it would go well and, though he knew he should not, daring to think what he would do with his earnings. That jubilant engagement in his work, like many aspects of his youth, had vanished long ago, beaten out of him by the routine of professional life.

Here on Earth, though, it all came rushing back. He lay awake in his motel room for hours, going over all of his plans, wondering whether he would be able to prove himself anew. Staging car accidents is a young man’s game, after all. But it wasn’t about money
anymore, and this reality was in itself liberating. The excitement of the project rekindled his youth. Nelson saw these positive feelings as validation of his decision to forgo retirement and continue his career, regardless of how things turned out.

On the morning of the big day, Nelson woke up well before the alarm he set in his room at the Colonial Inn in Haymarket, Virginia. He got dressed, walked to the diner on the corner, and ordered coffee and a donut. In his four weeks on Earth he had become quite fond of donuts. He particularly enjoyed the ones filled with jam. When he finished his breakfast, he walked out to the interstate and nervously paced the highway in the manner of an expectant father.

Nelson was nervous, but he was also a professional. He had thought through every detail of the plan. He secured a driver’s license for himself. He purchased a used Toyota Camry in red, which is the hardest color to see at sunset. He then replaced the brake lights with lower wattage bulbs, making them all the more difficult to see. Then he selected a segment of highway just over the crest of a hill where drivers would have the least visibility. This section of road, upon which Nelson now drove, was on the westerly portion of I–66, which emanated from Arlington and carried D.C. employees to their suburban homes after long days at work, when they were tired and least alert.

When he satisfied himself that every detail had been taken care of, he walked back into town to kill the rest of the day. He read the
USA Today
and ate at Sizzler where they had a pretty good lunch deal. You could get a steak, fries, and garlic bread for $6.99. Nelson liked the garlic bread a lot. Lunch made him sleepy so he went back to the Colonial Inn and took a nap for an hour. He got up and drowsily watched
Dr. Phil
for a few minutes, but couldn’t concentrate. So he got out of bed, took another shower, and then counted down the minutes until he got into his car and back to work.

S
IZZLER IS A RESTAURANT
chain that got its start in Culver City, California. It serves steak and seafood and puts out a nice salad bar. In the late fifties it had several hundred locations throughout the United States, but closed most of them in the East in the mid 1990s. This is strange since the food was surprisingly good. It is also strange that one of the few surviving locations is so close to Manassas Junction, the site of the First and Second Battles of Bull Run, two of the
key skirmishes of the Civil War. This makes for a peculiar juxtaposition. It is easy to imagine a soldier in the Union army thinking about what the world will look like in the future. If we could communicate with him, we would tell him, “In a hundred and fifty years’ time, there will be no more slavery. Furthermore, on this site, there will be a monument to your efforts: a restaurant serving steak and shrimp and garlic bread that is quite good.”

A
ROUND
5:15,
ABOUT AN
hour after she got the momentous call from Ralph, Jessica was driving in the right-hand lane of I–66, keeping up with the flow of traffic but going no faster. Her trunk and backseat were packed with hundreds of stuffed animals, which she kept in her car for work. Before leaving D.C., Jessica thought about unpacking the car, but she didn’t want to take the time and thought, in any case, the people at Greek Island could use a few stuffed animals in the days ahead. It was a good thing Ralph told her she would be issued fresh clothes and toiletries when she arrived at the shelter. She had no space in the car to accommodate her things.

Jessica was a cautious driver, and never exceeded the speed limit by more than five miles per hour, even under the threat of nuclear war. She was such a cautious driver that in high school driver’s education, on her first attempt at a left turn, she waited at the intersection for almost fifteen minutes before finding a comfortable opportunity. After the session, Jessica’s teacher went to the school principal and retired. It was thus particularly odd that a Toyota Camry a few hundred yards ahead was going even more slowly than Jessica’s own car.

A
T APPROXIMATELY
5:17,
JUST
past Exit 40, the exit for Haymarket and the Manassas National Battlefield Park, Jessica struck the red Toyota Camry in the rear. She did not see the car until a moment before the accident. Like Maude Anat-Denarian, Jessica immediately blamed herself. Maude blamed herself because she had been distracted by the fiasco at Trader Planet and by the engaging program on broccoli. Jessica believed herself to have been distracted too, in her case by the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse.

A
LSO LIKE
M
AUDE
, J
ESSICA
had been listening to the radio at the time of the accident. Maude had been listening to National Inter
galactic Radio; Jessica was listening to Mix 107, a D.C. station that follows the “Jack” format. The Jack format replaces disc jockeys with a rotation of 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s hits. Some people refer to it as the “MacKingization” of radio. This is a veiled shot at MacKing, which a lot of people really like. MacKing has really good fries and Dr Pepper in the soda fountain. At the time of the accident, the station was playing the REM song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” This song is a staple of the Jack format.-

N
ELSON
M
UNT
-Z
OLDARIAN TOOK GREAT
pride in his work. No one had ever been injured by one of his projects, other than some faceless insurance executives, and he did his best to ensure traffic was interrupted as minimally as possible. He considered himself a low-impact defrauder. But his first Earth project would have a greater effect on others than he anticipated.

When Jessica struck the back of Nelson’s Camry, it caused the trunk of her own car to spring open. This in turn loosed the hundreds of stuffed animals that had been packed into the trunk and scattered them all over the road. Because the animals were of quite high quality and looked so real, the driver of the car behind Jessica’s swerved to avoid hitting what appeared to be a nice bunny rabbit. This in turn caused the driver of the car immediately behind that one to brake hard so as to avoid another collision. One driver after another hit the brakes of his car, several thousand in all. Miraculously no one got hurt, but the resulting backup eventually stretched for more than eight miles.

T
HIS IS AN EXAMPLE
of a chain reaction, an enormously powerful concept. For example, in the mid 1990s a few kids in the East Village of Manhattan began wearing these horrible shoes made of brushed suede and a crepe sole called Hush Puppies. Pretty soon everyone had to have some, and the company, which had almost gone out of business, sold millions of pairs. It shows how little things can make a huge difference. The point is similarly illustrated when a neutron strikes an unstable atom causing the release of additional neutrons. It sounds innocent enough, but the resulting energy can level a city.

J
ESSICA STEPPED OUT OF
her car and went to check on the driver of the Camry. The man she hit introduced himself as Nelson. He was
nice, almost professional about the whole thing. When she apologized about the collision, he told her in a sweet southern drawl that accidents happen and the insurance company would take care of everything.

Nelson said, “Isn’t insurance a wonderful thing?”

“I suppose it is,” said Jessica.

“It certainly is,” said Nelson with conviction.

They turned and looked at the traffic behind them. From the crest of the hill they could see it stretched back all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see. In a curious way, it seemed rather beautiful, this river of cars.

“That’s something, isn’t it,” Jessica said.

“Sure is,” said Nelson. “I’ve been driving for more than fifty years, but I have never seen anything like this.”

“Don’t say.”

Nelson smiled. “But that’s the beauty of life, ain’t it, sugar?” he said. “You think you’ve seen everything and then, one day, you realize you ain’t seen nothing at all.”

I
T MAY STRIKE THE
reader as curious that Nelson Munt-Zoldarian speaks with a Southern accent given that he comes from the nation Shelbee on the planet Flossenberger, which is some 62,500 light-years from Earth. Similar to the conceit that mankind is the only sentient creature in the universe, this sentiment is another example of human hubris. The United States is hardly the only country with a South.

V
IEWED UP CLOSE, THE
river of cars wasn’t quite as beautiful as it appeared from a distance. After traffic on I–66 ground to a halt, people cursed and yelled. One driver honked because he was going to be late for his appointment with the chiropodist, who only had evening hours once a week. Another honked because he was late to meet his wife for dinner at Applebee’s. Several others honked because they had nothing to be late for. After a while, though, when it became obvious no one was going anywhere, people resigned themselves to a long wait. They rolled down their windows and shut off their cars.

Then, a curious thing happened. The people got out and began to collect the stuffed animals that had scattered across the asphalt. They talked to one another as they did. Exchanges were made.
Stuffed bunny rabbits were swapped for teddy bears, and vice versa, to better suit the preferences of the drivers’ children. A sweet and gentle scene evolved.

A half-mile back, a man pulled out his hibachi, which he had packed for a weekend camping trip, and grilled up some hot dogs and hamburgers. A second man brought out a case of beer from his trunk. The two organizers of this impromptu barbecue discovered they had been commuting on the same exact schedule for twenty-three years. They had driven past each other hundreds of times—perhaps on a bad day one had honked at the other in a fit of road rage—and never exchanged so much as a single word. Now they laughed and shared war stories of horrific traffic jams and missed Little League games and felt as if they had been friends for years.

When the mess finally cleared, hours later, the drivers departed feeling deeply attached to one another. In addition to all of their other identities and allegiances—American, Cornell graduate, Redskins fan, Democrat, Opraholic, shopaholic, hobbyist, allergy sufferer, human being—they were now members of the community of I–66, brought together unwittingly by an alien charlatan, stuffed animals, and a young woman with a heart of gold.

I
MYSELF WAS STUCK
in the jam on I–66, about a mile and a half behind Nelson’s Camry. I was on my way to my friend’s house in Nebo, North Carolina. Nebo is in the western part of the state about an hour east of Asheville. It’s small enough that it’s not on most maps. It has rolling hills and sprawling pastures filled with cows and sheep and the occasional alpaca. There’s a diner that has good pie. It is quite peaceful. As yet there aren’t many houses, but the developers are finding their way. Nebo is one of many places I have been that I worry will be ruined in the name of progress, such as it is. I feel this way too about Hawaii, Costa Rica, Alaska, Washington State, Maine, Vermont, New Zealand, and Balta.

L
IKE EVERYONE ELSE
I
was at first annoyed by the delay, but soon enough I got into the spirit of things. A few stuffed animals made their way back to me. I handed a rhinoceros to a boy in the backseat of a Suburban and kept a little lamb to give to my girlfriend. The man in the next car ahead offered me a Chocodile, which I hesi
tated to accept as I had nothing to offer him in return other than a chipped cinnamon Mentos.

“Please,” he said. “Many people have never heard of these, but they are quite delicious.”

“Thank you,” I said. Until that moment, I had heard of but never eaten a Chocodile. I gave it the once-over.

“Go ahead,” the man said. “It’s like a chocolate Twinkie. They’re very hard to get. A lot of people think they stopped making them, but you can actually order them by mail. I just got a shipment delivered to me at my office today.”

I smiled.

He said, “There are a few foods like that. Did you know that Mallomars are only made in the winter?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“One needs to pay attention to the important things in life.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” I said. I unwrapped the Chocodile and took a bite.

“What do you think?”

“It is really quite delicious,” I said. And it was.

J
ESSICA TRIED TO CALL
Ralph several times but failed on each occasion. Finally, she stopped trying. Jessica concluded that the problem was the unusual volume of calls coming from the same immediate area. It was true many of the people on I–66 were attempting to call home to say they would be late for dinner at Applebee’s or whatever, but this was not the real cause of the problem. The true cause was a raccoon, which had made its home in the base of the nearest cell phone tower and chewed through the wiring, which it mistook for vermicelli.