American Speechwriter

My first impressions of California were of its airport which stretched wide like it had been squeezed out a tube of toothpaste. Stepping into the compressed terminal building I could have been anywhere, which is to say I was tired and irritable. By the time I had collected my suitcase and finished all the petty admin required of me I was more than reluctant to meet Merkman and Thomas.

They had no trouble finding me, these army men. They introduced themselves as Captain and Lieutenant. I thought that was overkill, but I was used to riding with secret service from time to time and who could say if California were really so different from D.C.? I’m Jack, Jack Newman, I said, and they nodded though clearly they already knew. They were well turned-out at least, not in their uniforms but dark suits as if they really were secret service. Thomas was perhaps a little short and squat, a shape never quite complemented by a suit, but they both had that drilled sense of formality. They asked about my flight as we walked to the car and I must have said it was pleasant or some such thing. I couldn’t hide from the stiffness of my legs as I lugged that impossible suitcase down the steps and over the street.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked. Marvin, the Chief of Staff, really had withheld that key detail when the project was offered up as an inglorious soft-landing.

“Fort Irwin. Soon to be The Goldstone Observatory.” Captain Merkman said everything in the clipped manner of a middle ranking army officer.

“What? You mean it’s not a working observatory yet?”

“No it is. We’re yet to move out, it’s still an operational training base.” An olive-green sedan was duly found, and I couldn’t say more than that because I’m not a car guy. The Captain popped the trunk for me with a fatherly smile creased over thin lips. This was my ticket into the great desert. “So, you’re really the President’s speechwriter?”

“That’s me alright!” It had been up to a few short weeks ago.

“I’ll say. The base will be a bit different to working in the White House, I’d imagine.”

“I’m counting on it, Captain!”

“Please, you can call me Merkman.”

Now would be a great time to pass out the smokes, I thought. Come to think of it, I hadn’t lit up since leaving D.C. The pair warned me it was going to be a long trip. “What’s your role at the base?”

“Liaison. Between us and the Science Foundation. The radio observatory is still under joint command, you understand.”

I had been briefed on this, on the National Science Foundation at least, and repeatedly told that they were not NASA. At the time NASA were gearing up for their big trip to the moon, whilst the NSF handled the more down-to-earth ground-based astronomy. Thomas seemed a little starstruck in my presence, which was nice as it had been a while since anyone had acted like that around me, but it soon wore off and he began talking with that irritating twang of his. Thomas wanted to know about the White House – they usually did. Yes, the words that came out the President’s flabby mouth had been my ever so exquisite words, garbled through his thick drawl. For sure, no one stopped me in the supermarket, but I was renowned for a catchy turn of phrase. I was at my best squeezing a few short words into a momentous soundbite, an era defining vision. “The War on Poverty”, “The Great Society”. Whatever people remember about the period, this kept me on the D.C. party circuit – even after all the unpleasant business of that summer.

A few war stories ensured all were entertained for a while, and I relaxed into my seat with a self-assuredness that had been escaping me. Merkman looked back my way, his blue eyes unnaturally filling the mirror, and all was right in the world. This was a new start for me, one that I no doubt deserved, and I eagerly soaked up the L.A. scenery. I spotted a few of those majestic palms standing dead straight that I had wanted. Yes, I saw the sign though I had to crane my neck to make it out.

The two officers didn’t get the chance to come out here much, the odd weekend they said, it being so very far away. Merkman’s family was based in San Francisco anyway, a surprise perhaps given that was the hottest place on the planet at the time. Those hippies and freaks were leading our dear country’s cultural revolution and promising to overthrow old heads like my former employers. We were breaking into the Inland Empire by the time Thomas asked what I was planning on writing. I must have been warbling on with my stories, or is L.A. traffic not all it’s cracked up to be? Someone had turned the radio on, and it was playing stale jazz music, the old-fashioned stuff.

“To tell you truth, I haven’t given it much thought.” And I was telling the truth!

“Come off it!” Thomas spun round in his seat to plainly reveal his great big head. Any vestiges of shyness had long since been dispelled. “You must have fantasised about what to tell the little green men!”

“Nope – nada! I’m not that kind of writer. Not any more, I want to get to a feel for the time and place and then I’ll know what to write.”

“Nah, I’d know exactly what I would write if it was me. Let’s see… aliens… you’re telling them about America, right? So you’ve got to talk about freedom. Ha, the open road or something!”

“A chopped hog riding down Route 66?”

“Ha! Shit, I can’t believe you haven’t thought about it – it’s like you’re writing a postcard back to your folks or something.”

Merkman was tapping on the steering wheel all of a sudden, blue eyes lighting up. “You think anyone’s out there to hear your message?”

Whereas Thomas and I were screwing around, Merkman was turning the joke on me, much like the low-rent sprawl over the hill from Los Angeles boxing the car in. I didn’t like it when my work was not taken seriously – particularly at that time. “Sure – maybe. It’s a big universe but you know this is all about beating the Soviets anyway.”

“Ah yes, our good friends.” Thomas kept talking with that cartoonish voice of his. “You know, the guys at the foundation, the NSF, I think they really believe. I mean we wanted to use the antennas for missile defence – can’t get more practical than that! The science guys are tracking down this radio signal here and that signal there. I mean what’s it all for?”

I left the conversation to wither, lending Thomas’s words a quasi-philosophical significance that he certainly was not otherwise capable of invoking. It was nice to have some peace and quiet, engine and road noise notwithstanding, safe from the prattle about aliens, Soviets and other nonsense. It’s hard to believe but if the Soviets wanted to contact the stars then we wanted to contact the stars. That’s what it was like back then. Merkman struck me as a meddler with that hint of mockery of his, presumably that was what “liaison” meant, lacking the burly discreetness of my usual secret service pals stalking us entourage hangers-on. I wondered what the two officers had been briefed about me, anxious – feeling dirty even – but not so anxious I couldn’t fall into a troubled sleep, exhausted from the long flight.

I awoke when we hit a bump in the road, which reverberated through the car with a jarring malice. What was that, I instinctively asked. Nothing, just a pothole. My head was now back upright and out the window there was only an empty plain stretching in all directions. The road carved through it separating the dust into two great expanses covered by just the sparsest smattering of creosote bushes.

“We’re nearly there,” said Thomas. “The base is over the next valley.”

Great. I couldn’t quite see that, but Thomas turned out to be right, the journey couldn’t have taken another twenty minutes or so. Almost as soon as, I spotted a settlement of sorts in the distance, not the usual sort of settlement – tents, campervans, other vehicles. Nothing to do with the base you understand – at first I thought they were Indians! I asked Merkman.

“Oh, those people? Hippies, crazies, dope fiends.”

“What are they doing out here?”

“That’s as close as we let them. They’re UFO cultists, that’s their delusion. It’s no secret we’re searching for extra-terrestrial life out at the observatory. Contacting it in your case. They’ve come to get ‘beamed up’ or some such trash. God knows!”

“I see. Do they ever cause you trouble?”

“Not yet. Not yet.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at this remark, I didn’t know if Merkman was being serious. There was a grudging restraint to the words as if Merkman were a lawman just waiting for the protest to turn ugly and club some flowerchild over the head.

With one last spurt from the engine and all its attendant huffing and puffing we rounded the brow of the hill, now over the top, almost there, and I could see for the first time the observatory and fort complex spanning everywhere like a Bond villain’s lair. The dishes, there must have been twenty or thirty of them, basked in the sun to reveal a pure and unnatural whiteness wholly out of place in the yellows and browns of the desert. Their great antennas pointed upwards with an almost mystical reverence which made you wonder what exactly was all the way out there.

The setup appealed to the boy within me, further swollen by the relief of a completed journey. There were a lot of disparate parts to the base, which from a distance constituted a veritable rabbit warren of barracks, garages, headquarters, the stuff of army man’s wet dreams. I saw too an even bigger dish than the others. It stood outside the pattern of its smaller brethren, shrouded in a mesh of scaffolding, but already remarkable in its magnitude.

Merkman confirmed it for me. That was the dish that would broadcast my message to the far-flung parts of the universe. I stared hard at the empty vessel unsure of what to think.

I was allowed some time to freshen up in the room they assigned me, so I showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes – to be particular, the white suit I had bought for my trip to the sunny state of California. Admiring my sartorial foresight in the mirror, I was pleased with my transformation from D.C. insider to eccentric southern gentlemen. I had earned the right to dress like this, not by being southern, but through my lofty status as the President’s (former) speechwriter. The suit was a confrontation with common sense, thus leaving no one in any doubt that I was a Big Deal.

I had the papers they gave me at the gatehouse, identity papers, in my jacket pocket which was just as well as I later found myself out of place searching the Army Headquarters for wherever I was supposed to be. It was my general good fortune that led me to Director Andy Fields’ office. There was already a small crowd inside but not large enough to forgo the obligatory round of handshakes. Director Andy Fields had an oddly tender handshake, come to think of it, with those big and gentle hands, which did not exactly put me at ease as he welcomed all and sundry aboard what he called CETI. I hated the way it sounded; the ‘c’ pronounced gutturally like a Germanic ‘k’ as if it were some Nazi masterplan. For better or for worse, I was now part of Contacting Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Those were my orders at least.

Of course, I recognised Merkman and Thomas. I recognised Sebastian Pitman too, I used to read his column, which I did because it was there in the paper, not because I enjoyed his haughty, punctilious dissection of the comings and goings of American political life. He greeted me in that superior Manhattanite way of his, and I thought my god, I hate you already. The last thing I needed was to be working with a member of the press. The press had been my problem back in D.C. – that and Dorothy. It was different in the pre-Nixon era, not every indiscretion ended up in the papers, particularly when it came to extra-marital affairs, but the press pool knew my problems. Whether that extended beyond the White House pool and into the orbit of a New York Times columnist, I couldn’t tell, who could say how interesting I was to these vultures?

Before I could process any of this the last man introduced himself as James McKenzie, who came to be known as Mr. McKenzie. It was abundantly clear he was a real-life southern gentleman and his too light suit was complemented by a too light waistcoat, to my dismay outdoing my white suit in outlandishness, but even then resting on his lap was a matching wide brimmed hat that any other time would be found on his grey head, and this high stakes fashion game was a war so unwinnable I could have been paddling a one-man canoe up the Mekong delta. The man was a respected novelist too, not that respected though – I imagine Saul Bellow had been too busy.

Pitman was making conversation of the ingratiating sort, asking Fields about his background, how he found himself as the mighty and fearsome director of an observatory with somewhere between twenty and thirty radio antenna, that sort of thing. To my irritation he was actually quite good at this, and Andy Fields smiled as he told us about telescopes at Kitt Peak, which I didn’t really gather properly but involved at a minimum watching world destroying asteroids hurtling towards Earth. This straightforwardly revealed the director to be totally nutty in his deathly Look Up at The Stars! wonder.

My attention drifted, unsure of how to approach working with Pitman, but before too long one more joined us and the writing team was complete. Christ, he was young! Roger Seymour, feckless poet and feckless human being. He apologised for his tardiness, but no one could stay mad at Roger with his floppy hair and swimmer’s broad shoulders. Andy Fields begun the meeting in earnest.

“As you all know, you’re here to write our message, which if we’re really exceptionally lucky will be our first contact with an extra-terrestrial life form. A message that will forever be remembered as the greatest articulation of mankind that we could offer up at the time. On the matter of its recipient, now there’s really nothing more we can say about what that life form might be like. Will it be humanoid in form? Will it like to take long walks on the beach and stare at the sunset? Will it be moved to tears by Beethoven’s Third Symphony or will it prefer something more raucous and uplifting like Wagner? Whatever we find out there you will play a pivotal role in establishing relations. In other words, the contents of our greeting are up to you.

“None of you are here by accident. You have all been chosen because you are exemplary at what you do” – why thank you! – “and that is why we’re placing such trust in you. We’re tasking you with telling the stars about America. The United States of America! No small task! You are our diplomats and it’s up to you to introduce the universe to all that is good about America. The message should distil everything we love about our country – you know, like cherry pie and the Super Bowl Half-Time Show – everything’s that great about the free world, everything that’s noble and pure about the American spirit. And it simply must do that before the Soviets poison the water with their evil ideology! We cannot allow them to spoil the party with a Marxist-Leninist critique of Late Capitalism. Though do not fear, you can leave much of that to us, this is a technological battle too, the sort we excel at, but you must know the threat posed by their political communiqué is real.”

This was all very stars and stripes and eagle screeching. In some respects, Fields’s extended ramblings were a reasonable homage to what I did for a living, but this time we were really going for it, brass band marching on Independence Day whilst moms and pops look on from behind white picket fences.

Fields continued, the embers still flickering in his grey eyes, but turned his zeal towards dry technical details. “The Jansky antenna, that’s the big one, capable of threefold as many Megahertz as our transmitter at Arecibo, with a parabola that’s an incredible seven-hundred feet in diameter, will be completed in approximately two weeks’ time, which is when the message will need to be final. Now don’t worry about any translation difficulties or such things. Your message will be encoded using a Rosetta Stone if you will, mathematics, and will be accompanied by the necessary guidance to translate the message back into any language.”

The director kept going and going, now really enjoying the sound of his own voice. However, I became more drawn to Merkman who was sitting as impassively as ever. There was no way of reading him, wandering gaze notwithstanding, and it was as if he existed solely to read others. I steeled myself as a result, surrounded by a supposedly crack team of writers, who themselves may or may not have had the means to scrutinise my being, my involvement.

Suddenly the floor was open for questions and I was determined to get one in before Pitman, who was surely just now seeking to boss us around, pompous, priggish columnist of The Times such as him. I asked to where we were sending the message, which seemed a vaguely sensible thing to be interested in. I had asked dumber questions over the years.

“Messier Thirteen or M13 for short. That will be our first target for the message.” I could be glad Fields had not simply said space… “If you men know your constellations, M13 is a ‘star’ that forms part of Hercules, though of course it’s not one star but in fact hundreds of thousands of stars. We will broadcast your message on loop for a series of days and when we are done and if all has gone to plan we will move to the next target. That’ll probably be Andromeda, Messier Thirty-One, I’d like to start with the Greek galaxies first.”

And then Pitman began to ask his questions. As I had suspected Sebastian Pitman went into the most tedious level of detail and with such appalling intensity, which was just the journalist’s way. I had never done spokesman duties, I had made clear to everyone that I was a writer, and I resented the sport of it, the nihilistic gotcha-ism of the press’s inquiries. As a writer I just wanted everyone to stick to their prepared remarks, not take part in some parlour game. “Hey, hey, LBJ, just how many kids did you kill today?” A large part of my late career was spent listening to the President moan about the unfairness of it all, the press’s “irresponsibility with the facts” – to loosely paraphrase the man. In short, I was institutionally opposed to Pitman’s style of questioning. Having said that, Pitman did clarify an approximate word count which was a thousand words or no more than two sides of A4.

There was more to my concerns. Mr. McKenzie, a quiet soul, stroked his cowboy hat and I knew I had no ally there whatever his views, so that left Roger who was too busy being a poet. What I wanted from him I couldn’t really say but I just knew my chance of redemption, which I always felt was nailed on so securely, was greasing itself up like a marketing executive reaching for the Brylcreem. If there was some way of collecting Roger’s scattered poet energy that did not surge but spawned like tadpole scum ripening across a lake, I could direct it at Pitman and maybe I could wrestle the pen more firmly into my hand.

As I was mulling over various schemes and counter-schemes, Fields invited us for dinner, a dinner to be precise, whilst his youngish secretary passed some papers around for us to sign. I didn’t fully appreciate what I was signing away therefore, but it was something about secrets, presumably keeping them. I hated dinners (the event, not the meal). I had been to so many of them and they usually involved writing a speech for the boss and getting seated on the second-rate dignitary table. Of course, it wasn’t an invitation though, it was an obligation, I was being obligated to eat dinner with these people. What a chore, it was like being returned to my childhood and forcing down my mother’s bland – straight-up bad – cooking bite by bite, night after night.

Ink still drying on whatever death warrant I had signed, Andy Fields apologised for being busy (doing something). It was time to go. As we filtered out, Pitman caught me. “So Mr. Speechwriter! How about that? What did you make of the Director’s speech?”

“Ha, I’d give him a B-minus. Standard public administrator speaking territory.”

“Is that so?” There was a twinkle to Pitman’s eye that instantly made me regret not awarding a C-plus. The conversation moved on but part of me did not. Did he know about Dorothy? Her fellow members of the D.C. press pool were just jealous of her. The rumours of state secrets being exchanged for further exchange of bodily fluids were just that – motivated by spite, pettiness, desire to maintain journalistic standards. Well it was over now, the whole relationship, and Marvin had given me this chance to make everything back. One big rhetorical flourish and I would be back in time for the next election. Christ, they needed me!

And for the record, the broken engagement had nothing to do with anything.