CHAPTER 17
What's the world going to say when you force them to think about the 3 Big Questions?
When Bo and I burst through the Chapter, two pies flew out and hit us in the face, and we heard circus music playing behind the canned laughter.
While we struggled to our feet, letters and printed-out emails started pouring down from the sky. They kept falling and falling until we were completely covered with mail.
We climbed through the paper mountain and poked our heads out the top. There were bright lights blaring down at us, and we squinted as we tried to see where the lights were coming from.
"All right, commercial break. You've got ten minutes till we're back on the air," a voice boomed from somewhere beyond the lights.
The lights went off, and we saw cameras pulling back, and people rushing out of the giant room that we were in.
We were on a TV sound stage, and the director was heading towards us.
"This is only the hate mail from the first half-hour," the director said, nonchalantly from the bottom of the fifteen foot mountain of mail. "We've got fifty-two dump trucks from the second half-hour. What do you want us to do with them?"
Bo and I looked at each other and then back at the director. We shrugged.
"Whatever," the director sighed. "OK, it's getting close to air time."
The cameras rolled back in, and someone held up his hand, "In ten, nine, eight..."
We watched as the director's eyes went wide, and he gasped, and though he tried to stay where he was, he was yanked across the floor like he was being pulled by a giant magnet.
We watched as his feet were flying in the air behind him, and he plopped down in front of a television set. And though we could see the muscles in his neck straining as he tried to look away, the magnetic force would not let him.
Meanwhile, we decided to jump out of the pile of hate mail on the count of three. But apparently we jumped a little too hard, because when we leaped, we burst through the forty foot ceiling, and kept going.
From our cloudy position we could see that every one of seven five billion inhabitants in the Chapter were, like the director, imprisoned in front of their television sets.
And as we crashed through time zones, we saw some of the Chapters we'd just lived through being re-enacted. Only it was slightly different. They were showing these mindless sitcoms, except the characters were Bo and me, and the philosophic adventures we had experienced were sliced in between the canned laughter and the inevitable slip on the banana, tumble down the stairs, and cream pie in the face.
It was awful. But the next half-hour was worse. There wasn't any slapstick in this segment. Our odyssey was sandwiched in between exploding cars, machine gun rat-tat-tatting, and other action adventure scenes.
Finally there was one of those marathon commercial sessions, and everyone sighed as their straining muscles relaxed, and they pulled out their computers or their smart phones and started writing nasty emails about how awful it was that we ruined their favorite shows by sticking in that philosophic crap.
Then we were falling back down to the set, and the cameras were rolling and this huge crowd was coming towards us. I started counting quickly, and as near as I could tell, there were about 7 billion people in the angry mob. Less the camera man, of course, because somebody's got to shoot the picture.
Bo and I gulped and turned around to run in the other direction. But all the Chapters were there, dancing around, laughing, and blocking our way. "Ha, ha, ha! You didn't really prove any of us!" they sneered and hissed, and the angry mob was breathing down our necks. "All this philosophic mumbo-jumbo is a lot of crap!" the Chapters added as the angry mob grabbed us.
They threw us into the air like a couple of beach balls. We'd been through this once before, and we liked it even less this second time around.
"Why'd you have to go and try to open my eyes," one man cried as millions of hands tossed me into the air. "I was happy not worrying about all that crap. Now it keeps me up nights!"
I fell and a woman spat at me before another million hands heaved me up to the sky. "It's hard enough getting through life sometimes. People like you are always trying to force their stupid ideas on people. We're just not interested!"
"Yeah, you sit there safe in your fancy house, bored of life, so you think about garbage like this, while other people are living hand to mouth, trying to get food into their kid's bellies... so what if we have to believe in fairy tales to get us through, they're all we've got..."
I felt awful. "I'm sorry, everyone," I gasped as I plunged down, and then up, again and again.
I felt this huge wave of sadness and hopelessness, and I couldn't shake the feeling out of my head that I had created it. That's not what I had wanted to do!
"You've left us no choice, but to feel dismal and hopeless," a child cried. "Without our beliefs to hold on to, how can we live? Should we all just lay down and die now? Is that what you want?"
"It's lie down…" I started to mumble. "Ouch …NO! NO!" I yelled.
"Tell them it was all a joke," I heard Bo shriek from someplace.
Under the circumstances that sounded like a good idea. "It was just a joke," I squeaked as they started to drag us away. "What are you going to do, nail us to a cross?" I gasped as the image danced through my head.
"Figures you'd say that!" an angry man growled. "You philosophers all got a Christ-complex. Nope we're just gonna hang ya!"
That was certainly reassuring.
"Say you're a liar!" someone demanded.
Sure. I could do that. "I'm a liar!" I gasped.
"Say, everything you said was a lie."
"Everything I said was a lie," I agreed, as some not-too-nice looking nooses became all too clear just ahead.
"But wait," someone screamed. "That would mean you're telling the truth, but if everything you say is a lie then..."
"Hey," I yelled. "I saw that paradox on Star Trek too. They stole it from an ancient Greek philosopher named Epimenides. Look, I was just trying to figure it all out for myself. I was wrong for trying to drag anyone else into my own personal struggle to find Truth. I'm sorry. I'm just a fool. Now good night."
Everyone suddenly felt better. They started clapping, and they dropped Bo and me to the ground, and wiped their hands of everything we had said. Then they went back to thinking exactly the way they had before.
They went home and did exactly what they would have been doing if I hadn't bothered them with my silly ideas. Which of course was turn the television on.
A polite, handsome announcer was just starting to read a message from a piece of paper. "We apologize for the preceding program. This has been a test of the emergency broadcast network. In the event of a real emergency, such as an all-out global thermo-nuclear war, we would have shown you our regularly scheduled, mindless broadcast, so that your last few seconds on Earth would have been spent in pleasant distraction.
"But since it was only a test, our producers thought they'd give you something new and different. They knew it would be a confusing two hours, and that your brains would probably turn to mush, but as they pointed out, your brains turn to mush every night from the crap you watch anyway, so at least your brains would get a little workout for once in your lives.
"Those producers have been fired. We would like to apologize for their lack of judgement."
The announcer looked off to the side and there was Bo on the TV.
I looked around the barren desolate land all around me, and saw that I was alone. There was just me and this television sitting there in the middle of nowhere. Bo was starting to speak on the TV set.
"Look folks, we're sorry. If you got anything out of tonight's program at all, just take this. We're alive. Who knows why. Just try to be happy in your life. Try to make other people as happy as you can. And when it's over, it's over. If there's anything out there, you'll find out. If there isn't -- you won't...So cheer up. It's only a stupid show!" He turned to the side. "Is that what you wanted me to say?" he asked. "Oh... right." He turned back to the camera and smiled. "And now, we bring you back to our regularly scheduled program, already in progress." The smiled widened just before the TV exploded.
It was suddenly like the lights had gone off everywhere. I couldn't see a thing. It was completely dark.
It was dark all over.
There was nothing.
Nothing at all.
And then, I woke up. It had all been a dream, of course. But I had this great story now, and I could write it all down. Right? Three months later it was done. I'd written it: THE THREE BIG QUESTIONS.
I was kind of proud of it, actually. It sort of summed up all the crazy things that had been floating in my head for all my life.
It was like I had captured a deep part of myself. If I had to leave something behind to say that, 'these are my innermost thoughts' it would have to be this book!
Besides, I know people had thought these thoughts before, it's just that everyone was too afraid to voice them. THE THREE BIG QUESTIONS just felt like something that had to be said. It belonged to be out there.
I wasn't sure that it would really be able to help anyone. But it was the kind of book I wished I'd come across when 'figuring it all out' was the most important thing in my life. It wasn't now, and writing this book had helped get it all out of my system. Maybe it could do the same for someone else, too.
Anyway, you'd never believe what happened. It was a bestseller. No one read it, of course, but everyone bought it. It was the "IN" book that everyone had to have on their bookshelf to show that they weren't superficial, and were capable of pondering over the deeper questions in life. But of course, no one actually had the desire to read it, because, heck, it's all a bunch of crap, anyway.
But that's not all.
Some producer, who, of course, hadn't read the book, decided he was going to make a miniseries out of it (You know, I always loved the way that word looks. I love to pronounce it 'min-iseries' as in rhyming with miseries -- meaning small miseries). Then the Miracle happened.
The miniseries was supposed to be aired on this fledgling network opposite the big Tuesday Night Shows. But something happened. Somehow it ended up on all the networks, not to mention every cable channel on the homepage of every webpage.
No one is exactly sure what happened, but there are several theories.
The most probable is that an inept terrorist group had planned to air a propaganda film, and had locked the Emergency Broadcast System into their satellite transmission. Unfortunately (or fortunately) they hooked into the wrong satellite.
Once anyone knew what was happening, the authorities tried to shut the system down. But the EBS system had never been used before, and no one was sure how to turn it off.
Other theories range from Divine Intervention to aliens, to a publicity stunt to raise the ratings of the fledgling network that had originally intended to air it.
Anyway, whatever the reason, The Three Big Questions was on every channel on a cold, wintry Tuesday night from 8 until 11 (They decided to make it a one-night miniseries extravaganza).
That night, Jill and I watched the credits and we clapped when it said that it was written by me.
"Well, what'd you think, honey. Was it worth all those years I drove you crazy pondering life's great questions?"
She didn't answer.
The phone rang.
"You get it," I gasped. "It's probably the Nielsen rating. They said they'd call."
Jill's face was a complete blank while she listened and said, "Uh, huh," a few times.
"Well what did they say?" I gasped as soon as she hung up.
"Well," she hesitated. "They said it came in absolute last place." She put her arm around me. "Sorry, honey. The world wasn't ready for something like that. But, at least you've got me."
"But it was the only thing on TV!" I moaned.
She sighed. "Apparently, for the first time in the history of television and the internet, every one turned off their TVs, shut off their computers and powered down their smart phones for three hours."
"It's just as well," I sighed. I had felt kind of strange sharing my crazy beliefs with the world anyway. I didn't want anyone to get screwed up or anything because of me. Well, at least I wrote it. I got it off my chest. Now I can start living!
When we went to sleep that night, we snuggled, and I felt really good.
"Guess I'll have to go and get a real job, again," I whispered.
"Sorry, honey."
But actually, living a plain old mundane life didn't seem such a bad proposition anymore.
Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter