70. Skeptics

Once more, in the spirit of the times, we entrust this week's entry to the Alien himself who has agreed to answer a mailing he received from a fan.

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no C.W. They say he is just Big Dope’s alter ego. Papa says, “if C.W. says it, it's so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a C.W.?
The Virgin Anne Dillahunty, Rogers, Arkansas

Virgin Anne, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by home schooling and a lack of exposure to scientific thought and discovery. They do not believe except what they are told or see on television. They think that nothing can be which is not on Facebook. In this great universe of ours, if we could only understand ants, we could be witness to the wonderful secrets of our origins.

Yes, Virgin Anne, there is a C.W. He exists as certainly as Falloonian Gnoceracks exist. How dreary would be the world if there were no C.W. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virgins. There would be no quantum physics then, no natural selection to make sense of this existence. We should have no understanding, except in blind faith. The eternal light of knowledge would be extinguished as it nearly was on your planet a thousand years ago.

C.W. is someone’s alter ego! You might as well believe that the Sun is a chariot racing across the sky! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all night skies each night and not catch his transportation pod landing. Nobody sees C.W. unless he wants them to, but that is no sign that there is no C.W. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see electrons circling a nucleus? Have you ever seen bacteria? Of course not, but multitudes have been affected only because your species subjected them to scientific inquiry. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders, or horrors, there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

We welcome inquiries from all
our faithful readers. - C.W.

You may dissect the human heart and see what makes it beat. There is no veil covering the unseen world. Not even the darkest curtain of ignorance nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could hide it. Only science can allow us to begin to understand, as your species’ great Charles Darwin said, that “ … [F]rom so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” Ah, Virgin Anne, in all this galaxy there is nothing else more real and abiding than the natural world revealed.

No C.W.! Give thanks that he abides among us, questioning, spoofing, and amusing us with his style of pedantry. A thousand years from now, Virgin, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to expand the mind of childhood.

Your friend

The Editors

53. Running Away

We were experiencing the “Dog Days of Summer” and I was going for a walk but not venturing far from the condominium. I stopped to watch the construction at the park across Ninth Street when a young boy of five or six years of age walked up to me. Assuming he was from the church school next door, I ignored him until he spoke.


“Mr. can you help me?”

I looked around. It is no longer safe for a grown man to talk publicly to a child he doesn’t know.

“Please,” he said.

“What do you need?”

“I’m running away from home.”

Then I noticed he was carrying a grocery bag filled, I assumed, with his traveling gear. I became suspicious but decided to play along.

“And why are you running away?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I need some rest.”

“Tired?”

“Yes, Mama has me in two baseball leagues, a soccer league, swimming lessons, and a dance class.”

“All of that?”

It’s worse,” he said. “Now she wants to make me go to Vacation Bible School.”

“I see.”

“She calls it VBS but I know what it is.”

Continuing to play along, I said, “So you think your days are getting pretty full?”

“I’m so tired of doin’ stuff that I can’t sleep,” he said. “And besides …”

“Besides what?”

“My friend Tommy told me about a neat game you can play without any adults around at all.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s called ‘Space Fighters’ and you pretend that you and your friends are

Starship Troopers. All you need is some cardboard boxes and somewhere to play pretend.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yep. Don’t that sound like fun?”

“Indeed,” I said. “And where are you going to play this game?”

“In a place called the ‘One Hundred Acre Wood.”

“Sounds like a fun place to me.”

“And I could rest when we weren’t busy playing.”

“You mean take a nap or something?”

“Heck no,” he said. “I could read a book or something,” he thought for a moment and added, “Have you ever laid on your back and watched the clouds?”

“Once or twice.”

“I try to do that sometimes at baseball practice,” he said. “But the last time I did I got hit in the head by a fly ball.”

He paused and looked at me with this most wistful look. “Then they was going to kick me off the team but my mother and the coach got into an awful fight and they said I could stay on if I paid attention.”

“C.W.,” I said finally. “I get the picture.”

“What?” he said.

“Come on …” I started but just then a car screeched to a halt and a woman jumped out. She gave me a withering look and pushed the screaming child into the back seat. The car sped away.

“Suffer the little children,” a voice said. I turned and realized a priest from the school had been watching the whole affair.

“I was just standing here, Father,” I explained as I turned back toward the condo.

As I did, I heard him say to my back. “You are a most amazing species.”

48. Wonder

Just as I left the back door of my condominium building, I looked up saw a grown man skipping down Ferry Street. Yes, skipping—in broad daylight. I immediately turned and fumbled with my key, trying to get back inside the building.


“Hey, Big Dope. Wait up!” The figure skipped up. “Going for a walk?” it asked.

“C.W., what the hell are you doing?”

“Exercising. What are you doing?”

“By skipping?” I ignored him as best I could but noticed that several of the children at the church school across the street were watching. Their little faces were pressed against the wrought iron fence like prisoners watching a “free world” drama, every mouth open.

“Don’t you skip? It’s a great way to get around. Ever try it?”

“Not since I was five years old.”

“You humans certainly tend to forgo the joys of life as you get older,” he said. He had assumed a familiar shape. I couldn’t quite place it but it was someone from my past. “Taking the air, are you? Come on, I’ll go with you.”

“I am not skipping with you, C.W.”

“Calm down Big Guy,” he said, then “Jeez.”

“You can come along if you behave.”

“Moi?” he said in mock surprise. For reasons unknown to me he had been struggling to learn French. “Je suis le pire?” he said.

“C’est votre faute.”

“Merde,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

We walked around a former school, now serving as an apartment building for artist and writers. It was spring and the tulip trees were blooming. C.W. ran ahead and examined them, sniffing and touching the petals of one to gauge its substance.

“Simply beautiful,” he said. “We have nothing like this where I come from.”

“Come on,” I said. “We have to keep up a pace.

He turned and stared at me with a look of such mournful sadness that my mind flowed to an imagined gallery where I could picture the face of Christ in a painting by one of those Renaissance painters, captured in soft and subtle chiaroscuro. Then I was snapped back to reality.

“Come on then, Trou du cul.” This wasn’t starting out well.

We rounded the corner and walked along the front of the building. I was trying to pick up the pace when C.W. emitted a shriek and a stream of Falloonian that I couldn’t understand.

“Lookee, lokkee, lokkee,” he yelled and ran over to a sculpture standing on the corner of the apartment property. I had passed it dozens of times and hardly noticed it. It was a standing figure created from bits of broken glass and pottery, resembling a pair of giraffes.

“Oh my,” C.W. yelled as he ran over to it. “Would you look at this?”

I stopped and waited.

He seemed surprised that I wasn’t sharing his excitement. “Does you planet have a lot of neat stuff like this?”

I didn’t respond.

He turned back to the sculpture and caressed the broken pieces forming its surface. He hummed for a minute and then spoke rhythmically in a long, unbroken string of sounds in his native language, almost seeming to create a mystic union with this inanimate piece of work. After a minute or so he stopped, patted the sculpture a last time and walked back to where I stood.

“Tell me something,” he said.

“What?”

“At what age and by what process do they remove the sense of wonder from the bodies of your species?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Une tragédie,” he said.

We moved on. It was going to be a long walk.