Great Ball of Fire
The idea came to him as he clutched his throbbing knee. His knee throbbed courtesy of a beverage cart being pushed down the aisle of his flight by an attendant who wasn’t paying attention. Certainly not a unique occurrence. Even as your eyes travel across the page, somewhere there’s a flight attendant not paying attention. Getting a drink wrong. Giving a pillow to the wrong passenger. Saying “Have a nice day” to the herd of people exiting the plane without bothering to look up from her task of looking busy. What makes this incident worthy of being on the page is not only the owner of said throbbing knee but what he was doing on the plane in the first place.
Nap Lapkin.
Super spy.
He was flying to Washington, D.C. to once again save the planet from certain destruction.
That got you. I bet you’re thinking to yourself this is the quickest you’ve ever been sucked helplessly into a story, unable to resist reading on.
His throbbing knee got him thinking. (Thinking was the only way to avoid standing up and breaking the neck of the clumsy stewardess.) It occurred to him that the pain he was feeling would have been very different if that beverage cart had been traveling ten thousand miles per hour. Hurtling down the aisle like a metal comet. His knee would have simply been sheared off.
He sank back into his first-class seat and briefly imagined his leg flying off to land wetly somewhere in the back of the plane.
And that’s when he realized what made his leg hurt was the fact he was a conscious being. The various chemicals that made up his body were aware. Things collided in the universe all the time but rarely did they hurt because the objects weren’t aware. For a brief moment, he appreciated the throb in his knee.
Then he remembered why he was flying to Washington, D.C.
Damn it! Less than a dozen paragraphs in and I already don’t know if you put a period at the end of a sentence ending in D.C..
Damn it to hell, there it is again.
I would email my editor, but I’m in the grips of inspiration and don’t want to lose track of where I was going with this.
Now where the heck was I going with this?
Oh yes, Nap suddenly had a thought. Rookies might call it a hunch but Nap knew his intuition was never wrong. Where other people might have an educated guess, Nap leapt immediately into unshakable certainty. It was one of the many gifts that made him such an asset to his government. He could make a connection that seemed at the time absurd but in the end, was always proved correct.
However crazy it might appear at the time.
And this thought was crazy.
You see, Nap was flying to Washington, D.C. (thank goodness there were words after D.C. this time) to sit down and brainstorm with top officials about possible ways to stop the comet headed right for Earth from ending all life as we know it.
Even Washington, D.C.. (Now I’m just doing it to myself.)
He rubbed his sore knee and realized that this comet might actually be aware. He marveled at his own intuitiveness for a few minutes then pushed his seat back and went to sleep. He still had a few hours in the air.
When Nap Lapkin falls asleep on a plane, he dreams about plane-centric things. When he falls asleep on a train or inside a submarine, he dreams about sex. Obviously. They both look like penises. One could argue that a plane looks like a penis with wings sticking out of it and bring up the fact that many psychiatrists associate flying with sex but as I am the one writing this, whom are you going to believe?
And yes, I know many of you will still believe the psychiatrists just to be difficult, but as I can’t control who reads my stories, I suppose I have to let it go.
Nap had the following dream: he was flying on a new plane. A new plane with extremely large aisles. It was in some alternate reality where a five-hundred-pound woman had sued the airlines because she wanted to be a flight attendant but she was too fat and kept getting stuck in the aisles. In this alternate reality, there was nobody to sit her fat ass down to explain she was too fat for that particular occupation and instead, some agency with a title like American With Disabilities And Such forced all the airlines to buy all new planes with wider aisles to accommodate this woman. Of course, the woman never got to live out her dream of pushing a beverage cart down the aisle and hitting a passenger’s knee (Nap’s knee throbbed slightly as his subconscious realized what was going on between his ears and it caused him to stir slightly and mutter “fat bitch” before sinking back into a REM state) because she died of a heart attack while all the planes were being built. She was just too fat to live.
But her brave struggle to achieve her dream of pushing a beverage cart down the aisle and hitting a passenger’s knee (knee. stir. “fat bitch.”) did have consequences. In Third World countries around the world, they were able to buy the old planes at a great discount and thereby the number of aircraft fatalities plummeted. These “old” planes they were buying weren’t really old compared to the ones they had been flying until then. Their old planes were really old. Every third plane would burst into flames on the runway or disappear over whatever body of water they were flying over. Now they were able to afford nice planes because these Third World countries didn’t give a flying crap (get it? flying?) what a fat woman wanted to do for a career.
On the downside, the cost of flying in developed counties skyrocketed (that pun was unintended). Overnight, it quadrupled and airlines charged for every little thing they could. A passenger would hear the following safety announcement as the plane was ready to depart: “In the event of decompression, an oxygen mask will automatically appear in front of you. To start the flow of oxygen, insert your credit card and swipe it downwards, then pull the mask towards you. Place it firmly over your nose and mouth, secure the elastic band behind your head, and breathe normally. Although the bag does not inflate, oxygen is flowing to the mask. If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your own mask first, then swipe your card for each individual you would like to have oxygen supplied to. You will receive a discount of $3 off every person after your third swipe. Keep your mask on until a uniformed crew member advises you to remove it. Oxygen will continue to flow at a rate of $9 per half hour.”
It wasn’t long, due to the cash-crunch, that every flight included a decompression. Heaven forbid they were forced into a water landing; the cost of the slide was exorbitant to say nothing of the floatation devices.
At some point during the dream, he imagined a rocky flight filled with decompressions and water landings and was jolted awake. He realized that the plane he was flying in was hitting some turbulence and the two were probably connected somehow, although it wouldn’t explain the cynicism of the dream, and he closed his eyes once more and drifted off.
He knew that even if the plane crashed, he would somehow stumble out of the wreckage. Even if it crashed inside an active volcano, he would stagger out of the ash, coughing and no worse for wear.
He was a super-spy, for fuck’s sake.
Even if the somber faces gathered around the large table in the Pentagon’s formerly-named War Room (meaning that it was called the War Room but someone with a morose sense of humor had recently taped a piece of paper over it renaming it Panic Room) believed Nap Lapkin and his theory that the comet had consciousness, the information didn’t help much. While it perhaps explained why this anomaly they had been tracking for a decade had suddenly made a slight course correction and had gone from harmless blip in the night sky to engine of doom and destruction, they were no closer to figuring out how to deal with it.
Nap had begun disappearing and plowing the comely assistants that prowled the halls at a rate that was beginning to unnerve the usually-unflappable Generals. It was not uncommon for him to duck out of a meeting after making eye contact with a pretty girl walking by the room and not return until everyone had endured her cries of passion and ecstasy for more than an hour, in part due to the woefully inadequate acoustical properties of the adjoining supply closet. Since his arrival, he had spent more time in the supply closet than the War/Panic Room. At one time, at least two distinct female cries of passion and ecstasy were heard in what could only be described as a cacophony of foul language and grunts.
He was not taking the news well.
This worried the Generals.
Finally, he once again entered the room, wearing only one shoe, and collapsed onto a chair.
“What do we know for certain?” he asked.
“Well, until three days ago, this comet was due to fly by with millions of miles safely between us. Then out of nowhere, we get a call from some geek with a telescope asking us if we were aware that it was now on a collision course.”
For me to try and describe the particular General or even give him a name is simply a waste of everyone’s time. You have the room pictured, you have the Generals pictured. I trust you.
This did not sit well with Nap. He had seen the movie Armageddon. He looked out the large window of the conference room hoping a cute woman might be walking past. (I originally typed that it was a small window but then changed it to large after realizing nobody describes a window as medium-sized.)
“Nap! For god’s sake, man. This is serious,” said another General.
“Lance! For fuck’s sake man. Who gives a shit about the window?” said almost every reader.
“Have we considered flying a team of misfit blue-collar deep-core drillers up to the comet, having them crash-land on it, then blow it up using a nuclear bomb?” Nap asked intensely.
“You just described the plot of Armageddon,” replied a General curtly.
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Of course we did,” said another General sheepishly. “Apparently, that isn’t possible.”
The news hit Nap particularly hard due to the fact that Armageddon was one of his favorite flicks of all time and there was a part of him that believed had he had been left to blow up the asteroid like Bruce Willis, he would have somehow survived the blast and ended up washing ashore in Tahiti to great fanfare.
Suddenly, Nap noticed a thin man in the corner that wasn’t dripping with medals, badges, and ribbons. In fact, he looked downright civilian.
The man spoke. “This bad boy has a nucleus fifty miles across, an extended atmosphere of over 70,000, and a tail that goes on for days.” A scientist.
The scientist fidgeted for a few seconds. “The last part isn’t scientific. I was paraphrasing that scene in Joe Dirt where Christopher Walken says his ex-wife’s legs go on for days.”
“Definitely a scientist,” Nap thought to himself.
“And I’m thinking about the scene in Independence Day where the geeky scientist tries to make a joke when the fate of the world hangs in the balance and everyone in the theater wants to shoot him,” Nap said aloud.
“Can we give the comet a virus?!” one of the Generals piped up with great enthusiasm. When he realized his enthusiasm was misplaced, he was suddenly happy I hadn’t given him a name or even bothered to describe him in any detail so he could slink off into anonymity.
“We’re getting nowhere fast and we’re running out of time,” said the largest and jowliest of the Generals. “So if we’re done plumbing the depths of the silver screen, can we start to come up with some real suggestions?” he continued.
“If only John Hughes were here,” Nap thought wistfully. “He’d figure it out.”
The room fell silent. Finally, all eyes turned to Nap.
“To start with,” he offered up, “I’ll need to get closer to it. We’ll need to speak.”
The room fell even silenter. Occupants of the room looked back on the prior silence as if it were Mardi Gras.
Finally Nap Lapkin spoke again.
“Someone get me a rocket.”
If you think the U.S. government doesn’t have a number of specialized spacecraft equipped with a variety of different problem-solving payloads fueled up and ready at a moment’s notice, you’re kidding yourself. There are top-secret facilities scattered around the globe that have hangar after hangar stuffed full of vehicles that make stories such as this one possible. So, let’s just move on, shall we?
Nap stood looking up at the towering shuttle when he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“What have you gotten me into now, Lapkin?”
It was Madonna Axion. Just about the hottest female agent to ever grace whatever department she was working for at any given time. Any other man would have swung his head around at the sound of her approach with a speed that would produce a loud snapping sound and had their lifeless corpse falling to the ground, eyes eager to drink in the sight of her one last time, but Nap just continued staring up at the towering tribute to man’s need to explore.
“And why is Jeff Goldblum coming with us? You realize you’re an idiot, right?”
He finally, albeit slowly, turned around to face her. She looked, as always, spectacular.
She kept talking. “I understand that when the boys in Washington suggested their science geek go with you on this trip in case anything unusual happened you said, and I quote, ‘I’ll do you one better,’ and suggested Jeff Goldblum.” Her eyes rolled ever so slightly. “You understand Independence Day was a movie, right? Not a documentary. That Jeff Goldblum is an actor and not a genius, right? How on earth is that ‘one better,’ Nap?”
“On Earth it isn’t... but we’re not going to Earth,” Nap said dramatically.
It took her a moment to process his words.
“Holy shit. The comet might as well hit us now and get it over with.”
It’s fair to say that Jeff Goldblum was as equally unenthusiastic about going into space as Madonna was in having him there. In fact, he was crying as they loaded him into his seat in the ship. Blubbering. Not crying like a school girl; school girls under 200 lbs were incapable of it. It takes a man to blubber. Or, if you want to be totally honest about it, an extremely large school girl.
As long as we’re being honest, it wasn’t much of a secret that the reason Nap wanted Madonna to accompany him on this mission to save the planet was because he wanted to be the first human to have sex in outer space. Madonna was aware of this when she accepted the mission and considered it a small price to pay to be involved in the most important mission any agent had ever been a part of. She’d had sex with Nap numerous times and the idea of trying it in space seemed completely palatable.
They had barely left the atmosphere before both parties had unbuckled and moved to a quiet section of the ship. Off came the space suits and they attacked each other with historic ravenousness. A lesser author would spend six pages describing various sex acts that can be achieved in a weightless environment, but I have the comfort of knowing I have one of the most perverted readerships of any unknown writer, so I only have to start the balls rolling and your imagination can take it from there. The only thing of note is the fact that Nap forgot to bring a condom. This resulted in two noteworthy things: the first being that Madonna reminded him to pull out before achieving a climax. The second was, as it became clear he was nearing said climax, that she began screaming “Pull out!” in such a way that if this story was ever made into a movie, her screaming “Pull out! Pull out!” would definitely make it into the trailer due to the energy and sincerity with which she delivered the lines. Nobody watching would have any idea she was referring to Nap’s penis. They would assume it was at the end of some intense scene where lives hung in the balance.
I realize I said there was one thing to note and that led to two noteworthy things and that in your mind, you immediately imagined this as a flowchart where the word “note” appeared in a circle and had two branches off of it containing the words “noteworthy 1” and “noteworthy 2” also appearing in circles, and I forgive you. I can’t expect you to be wonderfully perverted and then begrudge the fact that you’re also into diagrams.
As long as this section is trying to be truthful, let me add that I’m sure some of you are even more perverted than I dreamed possible and some of you have even somehow created a pornographic flowchart where there are things appearing with a circle around them that would make a longshoreman blush.
So, Madonna, naked and gleaming with sweat, yelled “Pull out! Pull out!” at such a volume that the old expression “In space, nobody can hear you scream” is found to be completely inaccurate, so Nap did just that. Maybe it was the zero gravity or maybe it was the adrenaline of lift-off, but he had the most intense orgasm of his life.
Do you know how fast semen leaves the penis during an orgasm? I got two different numbers from two different websites. One, the Kinsey Institute, stated it was 28 miles per hour. The other said it was 31 mph and then went on to compare that to the top speed of a Peruvian Jaguar. That seems oddly specific. Not just any Jaguar, a Peruvian Jaguar. I think I’m going with the 28 mph.
The reason this speed is important is so you can visualize Nap ejaculating and having the sperm shoot out with no gravity to slow it down. On Earth- this data coming from the same source as our Peruvian Jaguar so don’t take this as gospel- the average distance sperm travels is 7-10 inches (although there is mention of a man who shot it 18 feet, but I’m not sure I trust that information... although perhaps at the time he was being chased by a Peruvian Jaguar... which apparently, given his orgasm, he really enjoys... and did you find it odd that I asked you not to take this as “gospel,” as if information about male orgasms appears in the Bible?). In this case, Nap’s loads just shot out and down a corridor one after another at top speed. His eyes were tightly closed but Madonna couldn’t look away as burst after burst shot out. Five. Six. Seven blasts from his man-cannon, each one expelling a long string of creamy white globules.
I hope for my sake you’ve seen how liquid acts in space. These packets of baby-batter are going to be floating around inside the spaceship for the rest of the story. Nap’s attempts at convincing Madonna to do the right thing and float around and swallow them fall on deaf ears and will eventually, when the story starts to lag and needs a quick lighter moment, lead to one of these salty beads ending up in the eye of Jeff Goldblum.
For the sake of the rest of the story, which is just about to get started, I’ll let it go at that. Although I’m sure I’ll regret it when, for years after writing this, I’ll think of hilarious things that could result from seven discharges of semen floating around a spaceship.
After coitus with Madonna, a quick bit of rest became priority number one for Nap. He sat back in the Captain’s chair he had installed - the entire command center for the ship had been quickly retrofitted to look exactly like the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise - and quickly fell asleep.
At some point, you might ask yourself why the government was not only willing to believe Nap’s contention that the comet hurtling towards them was somehow conscious but allow him to borrow a shuttle, complete with a knock-off of the Star Trek command center and commandeer Jeff Goldblum against his wishes.
Because he’s Nap Lapkin.
The feeling amongst most world leaders was they were lucky he didn’t demand to have Ben Affleck on call 24/7 in case he was needed to say “He doesn’t know how to fail.”
I hope that answers your question. If not, you clearly don’t deserve a Nap Lapkin story in the first place.
Nap had dreamt in airplanes and trains and submarines, but space was something new entirely.
This is what he dreamt: that he became somehow responsible for assembling every person on the planet to one location to hear some important information. Apparently, dreams in space center primarily on logistical problems.
For some reason, it was critical to get everyone on the planet together in one location. All 7.6 billion people needed to be together or something terrible would happen. (Note that as a writer, it pains me to have to state the current number of people on the planet. Nothing dates a work worse than information like that. When my writings become famous and are passed down from one generation to the next, the first thing people in January of 3016 will do is laugh at the number of people I give as the world’s population. They will smirk and think to themselves “Damn, back in 2017, there were certainly a lot of people on the planet,” or “Only 7.6 billion?” or “What’s a Peruvian Jaguar” or “18 feet was the record? I can do that with one hand now I’m equipped with the new Turbodick 600.” You can see my dilemma.)
Try for one minute to truly imagine the logistics behind getting everyone together in one area. It would have to be an enormous flat area where everyone could camp out and wait for whatever announcement was coming. Like a Woodstock on steroids (for readers in January of 3016, in 2017, steroids were actually considered a bad thing and not something you took every morning with breakfast). You would have to engage every car, every boat, every plane, train, and bicycle to get everyone from every corner of the globe. You would have to create teams of workers/soldiers to bring the people who didn’t want to come. I know I asked you to take a minute and imagine this scenario, but my gut is telling me you just breezed by this request in the hopes of finding another semen joke, but I want you to really stop and think about it.
It boggles the mind. It was boggling Nap’s mind in his dream... but he had to try and accomplish it just the same. Every. Single. Human. Brought to the same spot.
A logistical nightmare.
Nap’s head started to jerk from side to side as he slept. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. A bead of his semen floated by, dangerously close to his head (I couldn’t wait any longer).
An endless stream of humanity coming to one spot. Lines and lines of people in China and Australia and the Congo (yes people from 3016, Africa was still made up of different countries and not just a giant theme park) all waiting to be airlifted. Food, water, and shelter having to be provided every step of the way.
Nap’s hands began to twitch.
A billion people arriving. Then three billion. Then the last busload of them pulling up and being led to the field. Everyone was there.
Now what?
“You’ll never believe the dream I just had,” said Nap as he sat up from his commander’s chair and surveyed the bridge of the Enterprise.
“The one about your ex-girlfriend communicating to you through fortune cookies?” inquired Madonna.
“No, that’s not a dream. That’s real,” said Nap with a little too much force. Madonna knew that Nap believed that one of his ex-girlfriends had the ability to manipulate space and time to ensure that every fortune cookie he ever read would be a reminder of what a fool he was to have lost her. It got to the point that Nap could no longer enjoy a Chinese dinner. He knew he had to be out of the restaurant before the check came or risk getting another way-to-specific-to-be-a-coincidence message from his ex. The last time he opened a cookie, the message was so long, it took four pieces of the little paper crammed inside the cookie to remind him what his life would have been like if only he’d been attentive to her needs.
“The dream I had involved having to get everyone on Earth together to hear some kind of message,” related Nap, still a little frosty about the ex-girlfriend comment.
“Do you think it’s some kind of message from the comet?” asked Jeff Goldblum.
“Well, look who decided to join the party,” Nap said with undisguised sarcasm. The truth was Mr. Goldblum had done nothing the entire journey except sit in his seat and whimper. Nap was getting close to coming to the conclusion that his inclusion was a mistake and he perhaps should have gone with the real scientist. This did not sit well with him at all.
“And another thing Jeff Goldblum... no. My dream has nothing to do with the comet.”
The time to have it out with Jeff Goldblum had arrived.
“And yet another thing Jeff Goldblum... you have been a total disappointment so far.”
“What a shock that is,” whispered Madonna under her breath. “Whoever could have seen that coming?” she continued whispering until both Nap and Jeff turned her way to see what all the hushed tones were about.
“My point is,” an exacerbated Nap continued, “from this point on, you are no longer Jeff Goldblum. You are Chance Goodrod and you are a scientist. If you cannot handle this new role, I will be forced to hurl you into the cold depths of space outside this vessel.”
And pivoting quickly vis-à-vis topics, “I have also decided to give the comet a name and that name is Bill Haley. If I’m going to communicate with it, it needs a name.” Nap sat back with an air of halting pride plastered on his face from making this important decision.
“That makes no sense,” interjected Madonna, causing Nap’s face to become unplastered. Never a good look.
“What do you mean?”
“I think she means,” said the newly-minted Chance Goodrod, “that it was ‘Bill Haley and the Comets.’ Bill Haley wasn’t the comet.”
“In fact,” rallying to support Goodrod’s argument, “if anyone would be Bill Haley, it would be you,” said Madonna staring at Nap.
A wave of fury broke across Nap’s formerly plastered face. If he were Captain Kirk, there would have been no doubt in anyone’s mind he would have slapped a red shirt on both of them and they would have been the first ones down to explore whatever new world they happened to be visiting. As sure a death sentence as electric chairs could ever hope to be. In fact, for a brief moment, as he looked at them both and noticed they were wearing red shirts, a small smile crept across his face.
To Madonna and Chance, the small smile was just about as creepy as a small smile can be.
Composing himself quickly, Nap added “Ok, I will name the comet Comet. Comet the comet. Happy now? No whimsy at all.”
Feeling much bolder since the new role had been bestowed upon him, Chance spoke up again. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
“Shut up, Goodrod.” And with that, Nap turned to his instrumentation.
They were getting close.
Nap stood staring out of one of the portals in the ship, for the first time able to see the glowing speck that was hurtling towards them. He, Madonna, Chance, and everyone he knew and didn’t know back on Earth. Madonna floated up behind him and touched him gently on the shoulder. The two stood silently for a few moments staring out into the abyss. The reality of their mission perhaps sinking in for the first time.
Suddenly uncomfortable with the gravity of the moment, Madonna spoke. “Did you know Bill Haley was a raging alcoholic? He had ten or more kids and was apparently a terrible father to all of them.”
Looking out into space, the idea that Nap appeared to be a million miles away still made him the closest person around.
“I hope people of Earth realize that Halley’s Comet wasn’t named after him.”
Seemingly coming out of a trance, Nap looked at her and said “It doesn’t seem like you have much faith in the IQ of the people we’re here to save.”
Unexpectedly feeling wildly vulnerable, she started to tear up and said “I just want to know that it’s going to be ok. That people aren’t as dumb as I sometimes fear they are. That they know about Edward Halley.”
Her bottom lip trembled ever so slightly.
“I need a sign that there’s hope.”
Nap turned and put his hand on her face.
“Do you know the Stanley Kunitz poem Halley’s Comet?” he asked her. She looked at him and shook her head.
“Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there’d be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground’s edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I’d share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excite