“Hell, no, I ain’t going! Those bug-eyed winged critters want to shrink me down like some damn Shrinky-Dink and carry me off in a flying saucer...? Well, just they try, I’ll have me a big can of Raid Ant and Roach spray waitin’ for ‘em, and I ain’t lyin’...”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Louella Hepps. She’s good people... aside from all the cussing, that is (that I can do without). She’s had me over to her church, Victory Baptist, and they’re all good folks, even if they believe a little different. Their choir can’t be beat — I mean, that goes without saying. And their Easter barbeque...? Well, that’ll earn ‘em all a spot in Heaven, if nothing else does.
But the thing about Louella is, she can be as stubborn as mange on a dog. I should know — we’ve been working side by side in this same college cafeteria kitchen seven years now, ever since Clyde passed on to his heavenly reward and I lost the house and had to move into the trailer. Chopping lettuce next to the same woman for seven years, you get pretty darn familiar.
“I think maybe you should try to keep an open mind, Louella,” I said. “Those ‘bug-eyed winged critters,’ they say the world’s about to end. That’s a pretty big deal, no matter which way you look at it. Worth paying attention to.” I took a quick taste of the taco meat simmering in the big pot; it needed another tablespoon of salt. We’re mighty proud of our international menu here at Sabine Agricultural College. We’ve got us a Mexican food bar, an Italian food bar, and a Chinese food bar. On Saint Patrick’s Day, Louella and I add a pinch of green food coloring to the egg fu yung.
Louella waved her hands dismissively before sliding a frozen pizza into the oven. “Oh, the world’s gonna end, the world’s gonna end! How many times have I heard that same story? You been around as long as me, Norma. You remember, back when Jimmy Carter was president, we was all supposed to freeze to death? Whatever happened to that? And then there was that, what’d they call it, over-population? When we was all supposed to starve to death? You remember that movie? You know, the one where they killed the old people and turned ‘em into crackers to feed the young people? The one with the guy who played Moses? Tarnation... used to play on The Late Show all the time...”
“Something ‘Green,’” I said, emptying a packet of chopped parsley into the taco meat. “Wasn’t that it? Green Mansions, maybe? The Green Slime?”
“No, that weren’t it. Well, it don’t matter. Nowadays, it’s the global warming gonna get us. Warming? Really, now? When I was coming up, summertime, you wanted to brew some tea, you didn’t have to put the kettle on the stove. You just put a pitcher of water with a tea bag in it out on the back porch until the next commercial came on, and you had your damn tea brewed. Warming, huh...”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to poo-poo global warming,” I said. “Remember your Scripture, Louella. Revelation 16:8... ‘And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.’ And 16:9... ‘And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God...’”
Louella sniffed in that insufferable way she can get to. “Global warming ain’t from Scripture. No, no, no! It’s a conspiracy made up by the gays to distract attention from what they’re up to. I heard that from good sources. You ever notice how, as soon as they got gay ‘marriage,’ all them gay politicians and gay leaders changed the subject to global warming? ‘The world’s gonna end, the world’s gonna end, we got just twelve years left on the planet!’ They don’t want us to notice the other stuff they got up their sleeves. You know? Like legalizin’ relations with young boys and such...”
I’ve got nothing against black people, but they sure have a bee in their britches about the gays. We’ve got us some gays in our church. A few, anyway. Nice enough, I suppose. I mean, they don’t make a big honking deal about being gay, not the ones in our church. That Billy Donovan, he’s really kind of a sweetie. And he’s got a fine tenor voice for choir.
“Louella, what about Bill Nye the Science Guy? Is he gay?”
“Do you know for sure he’s not?”
I let Louella get the last word, ‘cause just then the clock struck eleven-thirty and the first students came through the doors and I had to stock the taco bar before the line backed up.
I got off my shift at three-thirty and headed for the employee parking lot over at the edge of old U.S. 80. The Silverado’d been burning oil something fierce, but I hoped it would hold out another year, at least, since I was in no financial shape to pay for no engine work. Clyde, bless his heart, had left me a perfectly good truck when he’d passed, but even the best of trucks don’t last forever. Of course, I reminded myself that if the bug-eyed critters were right, nursing along a sixteen-year-old Chevy that was burning a little motor oil would be the least of my problems. ‘Cause there wouldn’t be a Longview, Texas for me to drive around in anymore, anyway.
It just so happened that pretty much the same time I was thinking that thought, I came upon Sabine Agricultural College’s designated Free Speech Zone. It’s a little grassy square where the preachers have to go to preach the Word if they want to preach it on campus, and it’s where the Black Students Union and the Gay-Lesbian-Trans Alliance and the International Students Against Injustice in Palestine go when they want to hold their rallies or protests or whatever.
Well, there was some kind of a big ruckus going on. I hadn’t seen so many folks whoopin’ and hollering with signs and such since that time when the Sabine Christian Association amended their bylaws that so all officers had to be Christians of good moral standing, and in response a transvestite Satanist decided to run for Association president. When the other officers from the Association said he couldn’t run — whoa, mama! The protesters screaming discrimination! were packed so tight into the Free Speech Zone that day, you could’ve driven one of them monster trucks across the tops of their heads from one side to the other.
So what was it this time? Had the Sabine Republican Club tried inviting Rush Limbaugh to come give a talk again? I pushed my way through the protesters to see who or what it was they were protesting. Turns out it was more of a “what” than a “who.” Standing in the middle of the Free Speech Zone, protected by a quartet of campus security, was one of them space aliens — around seven feet tall, multiple sets of wings folded neatly behind its back, its three sets of arms crossed in front of what I’d guess was its belly in an almost demure fashion. I’d say its eyes were its most interesting feature. They kind of looked like oval lava lamps, of the sort you can buy at the mall at Spencer Gifts, but fancy ones, the extra-cost kind that change colors. (I’ll admit, I always wanted one for the living room, but Clyde would never pony up.) Those eyes changed colors in the nicest way, All nice, pretty pastel colors... lavender, pink, sky blue, lime green. If I had me a stadium chair and it wasn’t so darn hot and humid, I could sit and watch them change all day. Soothing, it was. The alien had set a sign near what I guessed were its feet, written on some sort of weird plastic placard. All it said was, Please Come With Us.
For the life of me, I couldn’t see what was so offensive about that. I know I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the message struck me as unoffensive, even polite. I turned back around to the pack of protesters and spotted a few of my regular customers, professors, in the crowd. They had advanced degrees up the wazzoo and wore tweed jackets and smoked pipes (that smelled, weirdly enough, like the inside of Spencer Gifts). I figured they were brainy enough to explain to me what I’d been missing about this here space alien and its kind.
I walked over to Gerald Nash from the Sociology Department. His sign said, Colonialists, Go Home! I said to him, “Jerry, what goes on here? How come you’re standing out in the sun, protesting this space alien?”
He looked startled, like I was a lamp post he’d been leaning on that had just started up talking. “Uh, I’m sorry, but who are you...?”
“I’m Norma Greenly, one of the cafeteria ladies who serves you your breakfast and lunch every working day. What have you got against that there space alien?”
“It’s obviously a colonialist,” he said, his tone emphasizing just how obvious I should find his observation. “You’d know that, if you’d ever read anything by Foucault or Fanon.”
“I’m afraid they aren’t on my reading list, Jerry. Explain it to me a little simpler.”
“This ‘black hole’ nonsense, it’s obviously a trick. No different than the few cents’ worth of beads and baubles the Dutch colonialists used to con the Native American inhabitants of Manhattan out of ownership of their home. It is as plain as the cap on my head that they mean to take us into space, eject us through their hatches into the absolute zero of the vacuum, and then take our emptied planet for their own. Foucault’s dialectics predict precisely this.”
“This Mr. Foucault,” I asked, “where can I hear him talk? I’d like to get his side of the story. Is he on CNN?”
“CNN...?” Jerry sniffed. “He’s been dead since 1984.”
“Oh.”
I moved on. I spotted Maurice Lewis from the American Studies Department. His sign read, To SERVE Man?????, with the word “SERVE” underlined three times in red. There was a drawing of a knife and fork under the words. His sign didn’t make any more sense to me than Jerry’s had, but I figured American Studies had to be easier to parse out than Sociology. I made a beeline for him through the crowd.
“Hi, Maurice,” I said. “You got a minute to tell me about that sign?”
“You’re, uh, from the cafeteria, right?” he said, adjusting his glasses to peer down at me. “You, um, stock the taco bar...?”
At least he remembered me better than Jerry had. “Yup, that’s me, Norma Greenly, the taco lady. I’m trying to figure out why everybody here’s so put out with this space alien. How come there’s a knife and a fork on your sign?”
“Are you a fan of the classic science fiction anthology from the golden age of broadcast television, The Twilight Zone?”
“You mean that old black-and-white thing? What used to play on Channel 8 years ago after the evening local news? Yeah, I guess I’ve watched it here and there, when there’s nothing much else on.”
“Are you familiar with the episode entitled, ‘To Serve Man,’ based on a short story by Damon Knight?”
“Is that one of the funny ones? I’m partial to the funny ones. Like that one with the butler from A Family Affair...”
“It wasn’t ‘one of the funny ones.’” He rolled his eyes. “It was dead serious, especially in relation to the current crisis. In ‘To Serve Man,’ seven-foot-tall aliens — about the same size as that creature standing there — came to Earth and presented themselves as our friends and benefactors... just like our real-life visitors are doing. To prove their benevolence, they visited the United Nations and shared a book they had written in their own language, which they said was titled To Serve Man. They shared fantastic technology with us and offered amazing vacation and study trips, at no cost, to anyone willing to travel with them on their spaceship back to their home planet. Millions and millions of people lined up for the chance. But at the same time the aliens were packing Earthlings onto their ships, one of our scientists was working diligently to translate the book the aliens had shared, the one called To Serve Man. You know what that scientist discovered, just before the episode ended? To Serve Man... was a cookbook!”
Oh, okay. I got it. Serve, like, to do good things for somebody, versus serve, like what I do at the taco bar. But one thing just didn’t make sense. “Maurice,” I said, “I’m no expert on foreign languages, but my grandpa came over from Germany and taught me some German when I was little. In English, the word for helping somebody out and the word for putting something on a plate are the same — ‘serve.’ But it don’t work that way in German, so far as I know. So what are the chances that that same one word would have those same two meanings in some space aliens’ language?”
Maurice looked like he was about to brain me with his sign. “Don’t ruin it!” he shrieked. “‘To Serve Man’ is an exquisite distillation of the mid-twentieth century conflict between utopian idealism and anti-communist paranoia! It is a key artifact of American postwar culture, a subversion of complacent bourgeois rejection of class consciousness. The aliens were actually meant as stand-ins for the military-industrial complex, you see–”
“Yeah, but it’s just an old TV show, Maurice. I mean, why should you take it to predict what’s actually in that there alien’s heart — assuming it has a heart? Isn’t there at least as much likelihood that it’s being genuine and means just what it says?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” he muttered. “Culture, you see, is a living, organic embodiment of mass consciousness that extends through time the way our bodies extend through space. Yesterday’s cultural constructions influence today’s cultural constructions, and today’s will influence tomorrow’s. But they are all, every bit of them, part of the same living, organic embodiment. My dissertation and my upcoming book show how, just as electric nerve impulses travel from one end of the body to the other, cultural impulses travel from one end to the other of the living, organic embodiment of mass consciousness that extends through time. In both directions — past-to-future and future-to-past. The latest discoveries in quantum particle physics bear this out. Regarding the current crisis, my theorem is that some future cultural producer, witnessing the genocide of humanity at the hands of these so-called benevolent aliens, sent a vibration, a cultural impulse, surging through the living, organic embodiment of mass consciousness back through time to reach the mind of Damon Knight, who wrote the story ‘To Serve Man,’ which inspired Rod Serling to film the famous episode of The Twilight Zone... which was subconsciously intended to be a warning to those of us confronting these aliens sixty years later.”
“Warning that the aliens are gonna eat us all...?”
“Yes! Yes! Now you understand! Besides, they have to be evil! They — they look like giant cockroaches!”
I didn’t ask him any more questions. Just quietly slipped out of the crowd and slunk back to my truck.
Boy, and they say we Evangelicals have weird ideas!
The next day was even more of a boiler. Off shift, walking back to my truck, I watched shimmering waves of heat rise from the black asphalt of old Highway 80. The bug-eyed alien still stood in the middle of the Free Speech Zone. Had it gone home for the night? Where would it have gone, anyway? Back to its flying saucer? To a Days Inn?
The crowd milling around with their protest signs was only about a third as big as yesterday’s... I’d guess because of the heat. I couldn’t see any sweat on that alien. Did cockroaches sweat? Did they have sweat glands? I sure did... I mean, there was a zero-percent chance I was gonna get another wearing out of my cafeteria uniform before dry cleaning it.
Anyway, I found myself feeling a little sorry for that alien, standing out there in the sun, not convincing a soul. A spirit of charity overtook me. Before I could think better of it, that spirit propelled me into the middle of the Free Speech Zone with the firm notion that I was gonna offer that alien some water.
A security guard (there was just one of them today) roused himself out of his heat-induced stupor when I walked near. “What you want, miss?”
“It’s darn hot out here. I want to ask that alien if it wants a cup of water.”
“You know for sure it drinks water?”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Well... I suppose it does,” I said. “I mean, even bugs drink water, don’t they?”
He shrugged.
I walked past him and approached the alien, who turned toward me, its eyes shifting in that same pleasant, soothing swirl of pastel colors I’d noticed the day before. “Excuse me,” I said to it. “Would you care for some water?”
It’s mouth — well, mandibles, I’d guess you’d call it — moved, but the words came out of a little silver box hung on a cord around its neck. “Your water is very satisfying and refreshing,” it said. “Yes, I would like some, thank you.”
Only then did I realize that the spirit of charity that had overtaken me hadn’t reminded me that it was after the time the campus sundries store closed for the day. Where was I going to get a bottle of water? There was a water fountain at the far end of the square. But I didn’t have a cup with me, and I didn’t suppose it’d be polite to cup some water in my palms and offer it to the alien. And whatever water I held would probably dribble out while I was walking with it, anyway.
“Uh, tell you what,” I said. “How about you and me drive to a place I know not far from here and get out of the sun and have a glass of something cold?”
“Will it be water? I like your water very much.”
“Yeah, sure. This place serves ice water, and they don’t even charge you for it. Come with me. I’m not parked far from here.”
“But I need to share my message,” it said. “That is my duty, and I must not shirk it.”
Sounded like some missionaries I know. So committed to spreading the Good Word, they’d stand on some street corner in the baking sun until they fell over with heat prostration. “Look,” I said, “these folks here aren’t buying what you’re selling. At least I’m willing to hear you out. Come on. You’re just wasting your time here.”
I couldn’t be sure, but it might’ve shrugged with two sets of those arms it had. It followed me obediently to my Chevy, carrying its sign with it.
I drove us to David’s Catfish King and Catering, over on Mobberly Avenue. I figured Catfish King was a better bet than the Chili’s because the Chili’s sponsored a happy hour late afternoons and the singles crowd tended to congregate there after getting off work. I didn’t want a bunch of soused office workers making pie eyes at the alien and me when we walked in. Catfish King, on the other hand, could be counted on to be deserted as a gun show in San Francisco, at least until five PM when the Early Bird Special kicked in.
Just as I’d predicted, at 4:20 PM the parking lot was empty, save for a rusted-out old Corolla and a banged-up F-150 that I figured must belong to the cook and the hostess. It was a seat-yourself sort of place, so I led the alien to a big booth near the back where it could stretch out its arms and wings, if it was of a mind to.
I’ve got to give that waitress credit. She barely batted an eye when she came over to our table, although her nose twitched some. Good upbringing, I supposed. “Welcome to David’s Catfish King,” she said. “What can I get you folks to drink today?”
“My friend’ll have an ice water,” I said. “Me, I’d like a Cherry Coke, please.”
“Sure thing. It’ll just be a minute.”
She brought us our beverages. Wouldn’t you know it, that alien slurped down that tall glass of ice water like a hound that just spent a whole East Texas summer chasing deer. It didn’t even need a straw. It brought its own — I mean, it had this kind of tube-like tongue that poked out from between its mandibles. The waitress stood by our booth, pink spots blooming on her cheeks, and watched the alien down that ice water. Then she quickly brought it another two glasses. I mentally added another three percent onto her tip.
“Excuse me,” the alien said after it sucked in its third glass of water and crunched the last of the ice cubes between its mandibles. “There is an Earth food I have heard about that sounds like it may be very similar to a delicious delicacy we have on my planet. I have been eager to partake of it. Do you think there is a chance this establishment offers Jello-Brand Gelatin? The lime-flavored kind that glows an iridescent green when exposed to a strong light source?”
“Well,” I said, “let’s check the dessert menu.” This was East Texas, after all. We liked our Jello ‘round these parts. “Bingo,” I said, pointing to the menu. “It’s right there beneath the pie of the day. But it’s fruit Jello. I hope that’s okay.”
“Explain to me this ‘fruit Jello’?”
“It’s nothing bad. They just dump a can of fruit cocktail into the liquid Jello before it goes into the refrigerator. Fruit Jello’s got grapes, cubed peaches, and those bright red maraschino cherries that are supposed to stay in your digestive tract for seven years.”
“Is this considered an Earth delicacy?”
“Depends on who you ask.”
“I will have some.”
Our waitress brought two servings of fruit Jello (to be neighborly, I ordered one for myself, although I would’ve preferred the lemon meringue pie). While we ate, not wanting to stare at my companion’s kinda complicated way of downing that fruit Jello, I watched the CNN Headline News on the TV in the corner. They showed a montage of aliens talking at the United Nations and to the British Parliament and the Chinese Communist Central Committee, plus other aliens holding signs like my companion’s on big, famous college campuses like Harvard and Stanford and the Sorbonne in France. I figured the aliens must be really, really thorough if they’d included a place like Sabine Agricultural on their itinerary.
I waited for my companion to finish scraping up the last flecks of its lime Jello and spitting out the maraschino cherries (I should’ve done the same, darn it). Then I asked, “So, how’s the campaign coming along? Y’all getting any takers on your offer to leave Earth?”
“Sadly, no. Only a handful of your scientists have offered to accompany us. You Earthlings have proven exceptionally resistant to our pleadings that you flee this planet before its ecosphere is devastated by the black hole that will absorb the molten contents at Earth’s core.”
I truly did not want to be impolite or pushy, but I figured I’d probably never have a better opportunity to ask an alien the questions I’d been itching to ask than I did right then. “Uh, I can’t say I understand the whole debate, not most of it, anyway, but aren’t our scientists saying that we’ve got telescopes that can pick up black holes? And aren’t they saying none of our telescopes or satellites see any black hole heading our way from the direction you folks say one is?”
“With all respect paid to your species’s technical accomplishments, your instruments are not yet sensitive enough to detect a black hole having dimensions as minuscule as this particular one’s. It is barely one one-hundredth the size of one of the sugar crystals that was mixed into that exceptionally delicious lime-flavored Jello-Brand Gelatin. Yet such is its power that it will inexorably carve its way through the various levels of your Earth’s crust and will not pause until it reaches your planet’s core, where, temporarily immobilized by gravitational forces, it will absorb the majority of the molten mass within itself before continuing on through the rock of the far side of your planet. This subtraction of your planet’s molten core will disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, its rotation, and even its orbit around your sun. This will result in planet-wide earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, as well as sudden changes in your atmosphere’s composition and surface temperatures that will be inimical to the continuation of all higher forms of life.
“We have seen such events happen before, many times. They are more common than you might think, for our universe is swarming with these tiny, unstoppable planet-killers. We have dedicated ourselves to our primary mission of rescuing intelligent life forms from such planetary disasters by transplanting them to suitable replacement worlds, along with breeding populations of the most useful and highly desired non-sentient plant and animal species.”
That seemed like an awful lot of trouble for these smart cockroach people to go to, running half-way across the galaxy to save planetfuls of folks a whole lot dumber than they were. I mean, I’ve heard of animal-lovers swerving suddenly to miss a cat running across the road, and then totaling their car against a tree, but this went way beyond that. Maybe Maurice Lewis was onto something after all? Maybe the aliens really did mix in chopped up people-parts with their lime Jello.
“You know,” I said, swirling my fingers in a small puddle of condensation that had dripped from my glass onto the table, “not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but what gave your people the idea that they should go to all that trouble, racing around the universe and all to save folks who can’t in no way return the favor? Not to cast aspersions, mind you. I’m just curious, like I’m sure a lot of people are.”
“We revere life,” the alien said. “Sentient life, especially. The universe teems with life, but its abundance makes it no less precious to us. If we are able to save even just a small remnant of an endangered race, we are obliged to do so.”
That word remnant, well, it just resonated with me. What happened next, I’m not sure whether it was my lunch companion engaging in a prayerful habit, like the way some Catholics will cross themselves after saying the name of the Savior, or whether the alien just needed to stretch a bit after drinking all that water and eating all that fruit Jello. But it leaned forward and unfolded its wings from its back, splaying them out over half the booth. Not just two wings, mind you. Three pair. Six wings.
And then it hit me.
Six. Wings.
Isaiah 6:2 — Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
Revelation 4:8 — And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within; and day and night they do not cease to say, “HOLY, HOLY, HOLY is THE LORD GOD, THE ALMIGHTY, WHO WAS AND WHO IS AND WHO IS TO COME.”
Now, I’ll tell you straight up, that alien in no way looked anything like any painting of any angel I’d ever seen. But then I thought, who says angels have to have blonde hair and pale skin and wings like doves’ wings? I mean, God could make His angels look like anything He wanted. Right? He could have lots and lots of them, as many as He wanted, and he could make them all different shapes and sizes, if He was of a mind to. Why not? Why couldn’t some angels look like big cockroaches? (I mean, didn’t Revelation 4:8 mention those angels being “full of eyes”?) Didn’t God love His cockroaches, just like He loved His human beings? If not, why the heck would He have made so many of them?
So I just had to pop the Big Question. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”
“Please explain Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He allowed Himself to be killed on the Cross so as to save all mankind from our sins. He rose from His grave three days after His death on the Cross, and He will come again before His Millennial Reign to Rapture his followers into Heaven before the Great Tribulation that will afflict all the non-believers.”
“This is very interesting,” the alien said, its mechanical voice box transmitting at a louder level than usual. “Is this a belief common to all the people of your planet?”
“Well, it’s not everyone’s belief,” I admitted. “But around here, it’s pretty universal, except for the Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics, and maybe a handful of Jews and Mormons.” I wasn’t going to let my question drop, though. “But putting all that aside, do you believe in a Savior who is the Son of the Creator? Is this Savior the one who told your people to fly around the universe rescuing folks from Great Tribulations?”
“I am uncertain of the subtleties inherent in your terminology. But yes, if I am understanding your words correctly, my people are guided by similar beliefs about the purpose of our existence in the cosmos.”
Hot diggity! The End Times were just around the corner, and I was gonna be around to see them! “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to talk with my pastor about all this. But I’m pretty darn sure he’s gonna want you to make your presentation to our congregation. And I’ll bet there are plenty of other congregations in East Texas and farther parts that’ll want to hear you speak your Word.”
Well, to cut a long story short, that’s how I ended up one of about 285 million Christians shrunk down to less than a millimeter tall and housed in tiny model cities aboard a spaceship bound for another part of the galaxy. My pastor had connections, and his connections had connections all over the country, and their connections had connections all over the world. Every Christian who believed in the Rapture was encouraged to go with our cockroach angel friends. Plus, lots of Christians who didn’t believe in the Rapture, and non-Christians, too, also got asked to come along, but not many did. The Chinese figured the aliens weren’t angels at all but a U.S. plot, animatronic creations of the Walt Disney Corporation or whatnot, meant to convince a billion Communist Chinese to abandon the planet so the Americans could take over the whole shebang. The Russians sided with the Chinese. The Arabs also thought like the Chinese did, only they blamed the Israelis for the plot instead of the Americans. The Indians didn’t know who to believe, and the European Union couldn’t get the aliens to commit to the E.U.’s definition of what makes cheese cheese, so they voted to stay behind. (Oh, I guess it must’ve been more complicated than just that.)
Still, thanks to the blessings of a hundred years’ missionary work, we got millions and millions of Rapture-believing Christians from Africa and Asia and Latin America to trust our alien angel friends and let themselves be compressed to smaller than ant-size. My personal angel friend, Dukdukduk Shaw-nay-duk (that’s not how she’s pronounces her name, but it’s as close as I can come), tried to explain the process to me. I won’t bore you with details, ‘cause I don’t understand them myself. Suffice to say, the angels’ spaceships are able to siphon off some of the incredible power of our sun (and other stars, too), and the angels have machines that can use that almost unimaginable power to compress the space between the nucleuses of the atoms in our bodies (did I get that right?) and the electrons that orbit around those nucleuses. Or something like that. Anyway, I can tell you from experience, it works. Then, when we get to whichever planet the angels have picked out for us, they’ll run us through the works again, but in reverse, so we’ll pop back up to full-size. All the plants and animals we’re bringing with us, too.
I have to tell you something that hurt my feelings some. Nancy Ann Weston, one of the young mothers in my congregation (she’s got five kids so far, three girls and two boys), showed me a copy of The New York Times newspaper she bought as a souvenir the day before we boarded our spaceship. The headline read, GOOD RIDDANCE! And they weren’t talking about the aliens, no sir. They were talking about us.
Nancy Ann thought that was kinda funny, that headline, since our angel friends had explained to her and her family (and everybody else coming along) what was about to happen to Earth and all the living things that were getting left behind. Me? Well... I was more hurt than amused. Then, later, more sad than amused. I tried telling myself that I was going to get to meet Jesus soon (even if he ended up looking like a big cockroach this time around), and I was being Raptured. Saved. So I should be all like, Par-TAY! I’m gonna crack open a Bud with Jesus! But that’s not how I felt. See, I kept thinking about Louella Hepps, and about all her fellow congregants at Victory Baptist. At Victory Baptist, they didn’t believe in the Rapture. I kept thinking about Louella, and all the other people and things that weren’t going to be a part of my life anymore, or a part of anybody’s lives. I kept thinking about Clyde’s little plot and his gravestone — nothing special, and he’d soon be on his way to a greater reward, but I’d miss it when it was gone, all the same. I’d even miss that silly ol’ oil-burning truck of his. I’d miss Lake Cherokee and the fleet of fishing boats at Forest Lake Reservoir. I’d miss the good table service at David’s Catfish King. Heck, I found myself missing Maurice Lewis and The Twilight Zone, and they weren’t even gone yet.
We lifted off. Climbing through the clouds, my stomach wasn’t much worse off than it had been that time Clyde made me ride the big coaster at Six Flags Over Texas. Then I suppose our ship and the other spaceships kind of hovered near Earth for a while, outside the atmosphere, waiting for the Great Tribulation to begin. Our hosts turned on a bunch of big TV screens (maybe they weren’t really all that big, but we were so small, they seemed mighty big) that showed different wilderness areas around the world. They wanted us to see what we were escaping from... probably because, if we didn’t see it with our own eyes, some of us would refuse to believe the Earth we’d known was gone.
They tried to be merciful. They didn’t train their telescope TVs on any cities or towns or inhabited places. I swear, at first I thought I was watching some of them old disaster movies, like Earthquake with Charlton Heston or The Day the Earth Caught Fire. With digital effects, film makers can do just about anything, nowadays. And that’s what I wanted to believe — this was a big hoax, like some sceptics said the moon landing had been. The aliens were showing us disaster movies that they’d whipped up, just to buffalo us into thinking our world was done for. And now that we were ant-sized, they were gonna take us back to their home planet so they could sprinkle us on their lime Jello like crushed walnuts and scarf us down. New taste sensation.
That’s what I wanted to believe. That the Earth was still the Earth, and the song birds still sang, and people would still be enjoying their Early Bird Specials at David’s Catfish King, if it managed to stay in business after so many of its old customers had been trucked into outer space. But my gut told me it wasn’t so. Hills and mountains turning to boiling mud, whole lakes getting swallowed up... it wasn’t just special effects.
So I stood there in the town square of my toy-sized model town, holding hands with Billy Donovan, the one with the sweet tenor voice, and watched the world end on a giant TV. Because you just needed to be holding someone’s hand at a time like that... a time like that.
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