First Contact (11 page)

T
HE
P
RESIDENT OF THE
United States and the First Lady stood on the North Portico awaiting the arrival of the Ambassador of the Intergalactic Union with a small measure of anticipation and a large measure of concern. The same could be said of the entire White House staff, which had assembled on the porch to form a ceremonial receiving line. Each staff member was eager and concerned, though for quite different reasons.

For example, Lucian Trundle, the chief butler, was anxious that all of the preparations had been adequate. The tables in the East Room had been set with Eisenhower gold base plates. Later the Franklin Delano Roosevelt china would be used for service. Kennedy Morgantown crystal and vermeil flatware had been set on soft gold damask tablecloths. Gold tapers adorned the crystal candelabra centerpieces, which were surrounded by an assortment
of roses and snowberries. The menu was traditional Israeli. Trundle worried, among other things, that it would have been better to set the table with the Woodrow Wilson base plates instead of the Eisenhower base plates and that the matzoh ball soup would be too salty.

Len Carlson hoped the state dinner for aliens would be enough to turn around the President’s fortunes. The President’s numbers had been sinking at the polls. The dinner could reestablish his credibility on national security and solidify support for his position on the Middle East. It could be just the thing to help the President turn the corner, but everything would have to go perfectly.

The President was thinking more or less the same thing.

The First Lady worried that she would explode out of her dress. Since the earliest days of the presidential campaign, her husband’s advisors had been urging the First Lady to lose weight. It was not so much that she was overweight as it was that the President was underweight. The press had poked fun at the President for his obsessive attention to fitness, which became more conspicuous when juxtaposed against his more robust wife. With the arrival of the aliens, the state dinner would draw more attention than any dinners that had come before, and, in turn, the relative waistlines of the President and his wife would be subject to the most exacting scrutiny. So the First Lady had basically starved herself for a week and gotten down from a size twelve to a ten and then squeezed herself into an eight. She could barely breathe.

Joe Quimble worried the whole thing had been a terrible mistake. So much depended on the premise the aliens were Jewish, a premise that was highly questionable to say the least. Ralph and David Prince also worried a terrible mistake had been made, but at the same time felt a breathless excitement at the prospect of Earth being welcomed into the community of the universe.

Chaim Muscovitz, director of the klezmer band that had been engaged to provide the evening’s entertainment, worried whether his group would be a hit. This was a huge deal for the Heavy Shtetl Klezmer Band. Other than this, their most important gig had been at Moishe Yosin’s Yiddish Festival in 1999, the year Shecky Greene headlined.

As with all things, it was a matter of perspective.

N
ED AND THE
A
MBASSADOR
exited from a cab on Pennsylvania Avenue. Ned was dressed smartly, in a blue oxford button-down
shirt and khaki pants. As promised, the Ambassador was dressed like a rabbi. He looked not unlike Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the beloved and recently deceased rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Judaism.

The fare from the hotel to the White House was seven dollars, but Ned gave the driver a twenty and told him to keep the change.

People on Rigel-Rigel tip big.

T
HE
P
RESIDENT WAITED NERVOUSLY
as the Ambassador, trailed by Ned, crossed the White House lawn. It seemed to take forever. Finally, the Ambassador ascended the steps to the North Portico. Solemnly, he turned to the President and addressed him in a commanding voice for all to hear: “People of Earth, we enslave you in the name of the Galactic Union. This planet will become a massive dry cleaner’s. The people of our home world have a wedding to attend next week. We are going to leave you four billion pairs of pants. Have them cleaned and pressed for next Thursday. We will return then to pick them up.”

At this point, the President of the United States peed in his underwear. He was quite upset about this since it was his only remaining comfortable pair that was clean.

After letting the President twist in the wind for a few seconds, the Ambassador slapped the President on the back and said he was kidding. Laughter broke out on the receiving line, although it was the nervous titter of relief and not the robust laughter of appreciation. The staff of the White House were universally pleased they would not be conscripted into service as dry cleaners. Len Carlson was particularly pleased since he was allergic to perchloroethylene.

Only the Ambassador adequately enjoyed his own joke. He howled long after the nervous laughter had subsided and at one point appeared unable to breathe. When the Ambassador finally calmed himself, the President softly said, “I don’t get it.”

“What’s that?”

“The joke. I don’t get the joke.”

“Oh, it’s an old Woody Allen routine,” the Ambassador said, straightening himself. “Haven’t you heard it? These aliens arrive and put everyone on Earth into a deep trance. The humans wake up and find out they have all been turned into tailors. The aliens give them pants to alter. ‘Can you have them by Friday?’ the aliens
ask. ‘How about Monday?’ say the humans. The aliens say, ‘We have a wedding to attend and really need them for the weekend.’ The humans agree and the aliens return on Friday, but the joke is on them because they travel a hundred million light-years and forget their ticket.”

The President offered a halfhearted effort at a smile. “You must be a great fan of Mr. Allen’s,” he said.

“We particularly enjoy his early, funny movies,” the Ambassador replied.

He then began to work himself into hysterics again. “I just love the idea,” the Ambassador said to himself, “of these aliens landing and demanding that their dry cleaning be done. We just had to do it. I told my associate Ned here it was the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.”

The President nodded politely.

Ned, who had taken a position at Ralph’s side, leaned over and said, “I told him no one would get it.”

T
HE
P
RESIDENT OF THE
United States may not have found the Woody Allen routine funny, but I find it to be quite brilliant. If I had been on the receiving line, I would have shared a hearty laugh with the Ambassador and like to believe the two of us would have become fast friends.

I
T WOULD BE IN ACCURATE
to say the President disliked Woody Allen. He had simply never seen a Woody Allen movie and had no idea Allen had ever been a stand-up comedian. Len Carlson, on the other hand, actively disliked Allen. Carlson knew of Woody Allen’s stand-up career because he had seen exactly one Woody Allen movie,
Annie Hall
. More accurately, Carlson had seen half of one Woody Allen movie because he walked out halfway through.

Annie Hall
is about Alvy Singer, a neurotic stand-up comedian and his relationship with the title character, played by Diane Keaton. At one point in the movie, Singer and Annie Hall are waiting in line to see a movie behind an insufferable blowhard who is pontificating about the philosopher and literary critic Marshall McLuhan. Allen steps out of character and, speaking as himself, gets into an argument with the gasbag about the correct interpretation of McLuhan’s work. To bolster his argument Mr.

Allen, or more accurately Mr. Singer-as-Allen, produces Professor McLuhan himself, who takes Woody’s side and puts the arrogant ticket holder in his place.

This was the point in the film where Len Carlson walked out. Carlson liked action movies with strong main characters and clear messages. He particularly liked Charles Bronson movies, especially
Death Wish
,
Death Wish II
, and
Death Wish 3
. Carlson found the whole idea of an actor stepping in and out of his character silly and off-putting. Carlson believed in a fundamental principle of performance art: the “fourth wall” should not be broken. This is the idea that people in a play or a movie should pretend the things happening on the stage or the screen are real and the audience is not there.

This is sometimes hard to do. At Broadway shows, for example, you can often hear the warning beep of a backward-moving truck or someone opening the wrapper to a sucking candy. I am not personally inclined toward violence, but one time at a play someone took almost five minutes to open a sucking candy, and I wanted to kill the person. It is particularly maddening behavior given one can buy cough drops or Life Savers, which do not come wrapped in plastic and are quite delicious. Anyway, distractions such as these do make it hard to suspend one’s disbelief, as they say in the storytelling biz.

Suspending one’s disbelief may be difficult, but Len Carlson, like many others, thought one must try and that it was incumbent upon the director or artist to help us along in this difficult process. So he didn’t like Woody Allen. But although neither Len Carlson nor the President liked Mr. Allen, they were nevertheless pleased the Ambassador was fond of the director. This was because Carlson and the President believed the only fans of Woody Allen were Jewish.

T
HIS CLAIM—THAT ONLY
Jews like Woody Allen—is patently untrue. Allen’s films are enormously popular in France, despite the reputation of the French as anti-Semitic. They are also popular in Italy and Argentina. They are also popular in many other galaxies, including the galaxy in which Rigel-Rigel is located. Because of Earth’s previous isolation from the intergalactic community, no residuals have been paid in connection with the extraterrestrial screening of these movies. This is a matter for Mr. Allen’s attorneys.

A
FTER THE
A
MBASSADOR MET
the First Lady, Len Carlson, Joe Quimble, and the rest of the White House executive staff, the President ushered him into the East Room, where the Eisenhower base plates had been set upon the tables. The President gestured for everyone to sit, which they did. He then made an effort at small talk, which is obligatory at such events. For example, Nixon and Mao spent several minutes discussing luggage.

The President turned to familiar terrain. “Have you had a chance to explore Washington?” he asked.

“A little bit,” the Ambassador said.

“Have you enjoyed our beautiful fall weather? I think it is the nicest time of year here in the capital.”

“Yes,” said the Ambassador. “Ned and I enjoy weather very much.”

Nonplussed, the President nodded politely and tried another tack. “We have prepared a fine meal in your honor this evening. I hope you are hungry.”

“Yes,” said the Ambassador. “And I see the visage of Dwight Eisenhower adorns our dinnerware?”

“You know Eisenhower?” the President asked.

“We are fascinated by history. Eisenhower was a remarkable man.”

“Yes, he was a great general and led our nation to victory in World War II,” said the President. “He was not an outstanding athlete, but by all accounts an enthusiastic, if not gifted, golfer. I understand as a young man he was a fair runner. I like to think that in his younger years he could have offered me a fair race, but I expect I ultimately would have beaten him.”

The Ambassador nodded politely.

“We do not have war where I come from,” the Ambassador said.

“Surely you must have disputes or conflicts,” the President said incredulously.

“Of course we have conflicts.”

“Then how do you resolve them?”

“We resolve them through indefatigable negotiation. One time we had a dispute with a neighbor over ownership of a comet that regularly passed between our planets. The negotiations lasted more than six hundred years.”

“And when negotiation fails?”

“We will fight only when it is absolutely necessary.”

“Then you do have war.”

“Not exactly. Your word has a connotation that does not apply to our concept. We do not see our conflicts as battles between good and evil. If someone attacks us, we will defend ourselves. But we respond with precisely proportionate force. And we take life only when absolutely necessary.”

“What if it’s a race of hideous insect creatures?”

“We treat all life with respect.”

“Well, perhaps you do not view your conflicts as being between good and evil, but surely at least between right and wrong.”

“Not even this,” the Ambassador said. “The universe is a big place. We understand people’s interests will sometimes come into conflict with one another, and sometimes the peaceable resolution of these conflicts is not possible.”

“But sometimes people are just evil and must be dealt with.”

“Like your Hitler,” the Ambassador said, to which the President nodded vigorously.

“We view acts as evil and respond to these acts proportionately,” the Ambassador said, “but we do not judge people. We understand people are to a large extent a product of their environment. Born into one set of life circumstances, they may do things that would horrify them if they had lived under another set of conditions. We understand also that some component of evil is relative. For example, many planets in the universe regard the farming and slaughter of animals for food as mass murder. We have found it is best not to be moralistic about these things.”

Eager to change the topic, the President made a second effort at small talk. “Have you had a long trip?” he asked.

“Quite long,” said the Ambassador. “We traveled approximately fifty thousand light-years to get here.”

“You must have quite a case of jet lag.”

“We don’t travel in a jet per se. It’s a luxury intergalactic cruiser capable of traveling more than ten times the speed of light.”