ready.”
A phone rang. Cody answered it. He listened for a brief moment and hung up.
“The backlash has started. Headlines are already reading 'President doesn't take position seriously,' etc.”
“I don't,” said Gordo.
Cody sighed. He wondered what they gotten themselves into. But rules were rules.
Instead of landing at an airport, they landed directly in the backyard of the actual White House. There wasn't even a concrete runway. They touched down right on the grass. The pristine greenery was shredded up by three long muddy slashes.
A staircase was moved in front of the aircraft. Gordo was the first one out. He surveyed the scene.
A mass of reporters and paparazzi set off a conjunctive haze of flash-bulbs so staggeringly bright it could have lit up an entire desert for a scene in a David Lean movie. The flash caused Gordo to stumble like the blinded villian at the end of Rear Window. Had Cody not been there to keep him from falling, Gordo would have surely tumbled down the stairs like Gerald Ford.
Like many human scenes, this one was strange. Off to the side, an orchestra of uncountable instruments struck up a vaguely familiar tune. There was grandiose decoration everywhere, like purposeless shiny gold pillars cordoned off by fake velvet ropes and gold clasps. The acre-long path from Air Force One to the White House porch was lined with an epically sprawling red carpet. The clean perfection of the carpet was an interesting contrast to the torn-up lawn that it partially covered. Everything was artificial and too-grand like old-Hollywood Oscar night.
That's what this is, a movie set. They're trying to capture realistic performances by tricking everyday-people into thinking it's real. I'll let them think I'm fooled for a little bit.
As Gordo walked down the red carpet, he noticed that UFO's seemed to be lined up along the perimeter of the outer fence. They were classically phony silver-discs, the flying-saucers of Ed Wood variety. Cheesy green lights flashed intermittently through small round windows. The glass didn't look strong enough for outer space.
“Why are there UFO's?” Gordo asked.
“So the visitors can get home.”
“Visitors?”
“You know, aliens.”
“Those are real?”
Of course.”
"They look so fake.”
“They're not very good UFO's,” whispered Cody. “But don't tell anyone we skimped on the hospitality budget.”
“Where are they?” asked Gordo, looking around with wonder.
“Backstage.”
“Why weren't we here to see them land?”
“The space-ships were built here on Earth. They have never been used. The visitors teleported here, and will be using the ships only for their return trip. The visitors plan to indulge themselves with a few substances during the inauguration festivities. It is not safe to teleport while intoxicated.”
“You'd think it'd be safer to teleport than fly.”
“No. The ships are built with an automatic flight plan. Nothing more than entering and exiting the ship is required of the wasted aliens. Teleportation, on the other hand, does not work properly when disassembling intoxicated life-forms. It has something to do with a dysfunction of the blood cells.”
There were a lot of people on the White House lawn. Aside from the usual millionaires, political bigwigs and secret service agents, there were also everyday civilians scattered at random. Gordo wondered who they were and how they had managed to gain an invitation to what would surely go down as one of the most iconic moments in American Politics. Perhaps they had won their ticket in a lottery. They stood alone. For some reason they looked faded and listless. They stood in the sun and had no shadows.
Suddenly something hit Gordo hard in the back of the neck.
“What was that?!” yelled Gordo.
“A microphone was thrown at you,” said Cody. “From the podium at the end of the carpet.”
“Why?”
“They were trying to interview an alien named Prollk, and because he disapproves of this whole scene, as he put it, he decided to chuck an object of pain-inflicting proportions at the new and grossly inadequate President. The uproar you are now hearing is apparently the crowd’s approval.”
Gordo was surprised the mellow crowd had made such a booming noise. They were too divided to muster such a collective hurrah for the ages. No one even seemed to move. Everyone within Gordo's sight had their hands in their pockets and their mouths closed.
It wasn't for a few minutes that Gordo realized none of these people were real. They were an elaborate combination of holograms, statues, mannequins and dummies. The uproar came from outside the fenced perimeter of the lawn, from the real crowd of people gathered on the street. Those who either had been unable to afford the ticket or hadn't been cleared for security. Gordo figured the alien visitors made security clearance nearly impossible.
“The fake people are a little trick we are pulling on the Aliens,” explained Cody. “We wish to convey to them our dominance over the masses by portraying what they think is a completely random smattering of the public as being entirely comprised of uber-consumer zombies that are devoid of thought, speech or motion. Dead, in fact.”
“Meanwhile the real public is gathered outside?”
“Yes,” said Cody. “They are.”
“What's going on here?” asked Gordo.
The scene began to climax. It proved to be a memorable evening.
The orchestra, having already played their committed time slot of 2 hours, disassembled and gave way to many other things, such as a legion of juggling plate-spinning fire-emblazoned unicyclists, a group of soaring loons hooked onto out-of-control jet packs, mad barking dogs, psychedelic day-glo painted turtles, dancing mantra-chanting holy wise-men, marching bands with a hundred drummers, holograms holding hands, bonfires of absurdist manifestos, planned obsolescence, lunar-cycle blood rituals, ineffectual seances, a new religion of people who only walk on their hands and say words backwards, people wearing bags on their heads, people huffing toxicity out of bags, people confusedly popping paper bags at the exact instant of gunfire amongst the crowd, unimaginable alien music transmitted telepathically during slow-motion shots of billion-dollar fireworks shows, mass pollution of the skies, propaganda posters, irate bankers, the march of the destitute, lucid dreamers, non-dreamers, outsiders, fast-dealing swindler card-sharks, pickpockets like a wave through the crowd that made everything of false value disappear by throwing away all the money, transcendent model replications of all the famous ancient magnetic locations like Stonehenge and the pyramids, breakfast in bed, ping-pong, mannequins who realize they are alive like a reversal of the rude-awakenings at the end of a Twilight Zone episode, puppet shows, dramatic re-enactments of things that only happened minutes earlier, three hours of Japanese seizure-cartoons, cucumber sandwiches, talking goats, squawking ostriches, an impersonator contest to see who is the best Howard Beale: Mad Prophet of the Airwaves, a random lottery to see who will assassinate the winner of the Mad Prophet contest, a marathon of droll and highly-dated radio-plays, motorcycle gangs, covert riot squads, jewel heists, an erroneous wave of fear that the Aliens were body-snatchers and that much of the crowd had already been turned into pod-people, a ten minute break where everyone was allowed to check their facebook and inform their loved ones that they had not been turned into pod-people, hours of meditative silence, drifting seaweed, interzones, harsh guttural whoops from mystified ghosts, classic movies projected onto many diamond-shaped screens perched high above in a 360 ring of collaborative images as if the sky itself unfolded alive in third dimension and was a domed organic theatre (which it was), euphoric middle of the night swimming excursions into the natural psychedelia of the phosphorescent plankton, painted elephants, gunfight duels, car duels, mind duels, masonic training videos, hurricanes, hang-nails, moral oblivion, life-size chess games, expensive 12-course alien meals, a mass crowding of the bathrooms by sick people who couldn't handle the digestion of inter-planeta
ry food, a pie-fight, a hot-air balloon trek, the time-warp, finger painting, the discovery of a brand-new species, the extinction of a well-known species, bagism, squadrons of debate teams nitpicking over inconsequential minutiae, visitations from knowledge-seeking reptile companions of shamanistic characters living on the wild untamed fringe of society, silly jokes, jesters, bards, minstrels, scops, poets, painters, underwater rabbits, heat-stroke mirage images, microchips from the mainstream grid-line, the loss of only copies of novels, complex terrorist explosions that were conveniently isolated in uninhabited areas and were thus likely staged for the entertainment of the Aliens, a swamping of the seemingly fortified outer fences by the passionately rebellious masses, tea, coconuts, bananas, kaleidoscopic afternoons, the discovery of a portal to another dimension within a vacuum cleaner, the synchronicity of alarm clocks, the microscopic analysis of the soul, car rides, bus rides, boat rides, plane rides, train rides, grifters, ice cream, wastefulness, a solar eclipse, pin the tail on the donkey, broken trolley cars backtracking down steep roller-coaster hills, readings of books, obscenity trials, limitless bonfires, the invention of a musical instrument by crafting something familiar that ends up resonating with the wholly unique sound of your imperfect touch, attempts to keep at bay the tide of garbage residue encroaching the perfect blotch-free white walls,
Presidential Soup - By Zack Mitchell Page 3