"What Do You Mean They Don't Believe in Me?"
A Story about Human Belief
Part One:
“What do you mean they don’t believe in me?”
Alf was sitting in the Big Man’s study. The floor was carpeted in red and the walls were green. The fire in the fireplace was so hot, Alf was beginning to sweat from fifteen feet away, and he’d come in from outside where it was forty below. Alf remembered that it was forty below because for once he wasn’t going to have to translate to Fahrenheit for the Big Man, who still insisted that Celsius didn’t make sense.
“I don’t know what to tell you, boss,” said Alf. “They don’t believe in you.”
“What do they believe in, then?” boomed his boss.
“Nothing,” said Alf, holding his hands up.
“You mean you don’t have an answer or they actually believe in nothing?”
“I mean they believe in nothing,” said Alf. “Nihil. Latin word for nothing. They believe in nihil. You join that together with the suffix -ist…”
Alf gave up. His boss didn’t read philosophy written after the eighteenth century, because he claimed there hadn’t been any developments since then worth reading. He didn’t know what a nihilist was. Then again, he would probably point out that neither did most of the human beings Alf was calling nihilists.
“I wonder,” said Alf’s boss. “Is it possible to believe in nothing? In nothing. Is there a difference between believing in nothing, and not believing in anything? And is not believing anything the same as not believing in anything?”
Alf wondered whether maybe his boss had been reading philosophy after all. He tried a different tactic.
“They don’t think you exist,” he said. He glanced up at the ceiling. Crystal chandeliers and fine carvings inlaid with silver and gold. His eyes ran down past the stained-glass windows and the tiny evergreen trees on the mantle to the floor again, then over to the hanging tapestry, which depicted a tall, thin man with a long beard, dressed in red and hunting reindeer with a crossbow.
“I see. You mean they think I don’t exist.”
“Yes!” said Alf.
It took another twenty minutes, but finally Alf seemed to impress upon his boss that his clients no longer desired his services.
“Ah,” said the Big Man gravely. “I see. That’s very serious. Very serious indeed.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Alf.
“Do? Do? Why we are going to show them something they can’t help but believe in,” said his boss. “We’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Alf was pretty sure his boss didn’t watch television and hadn’t seen any films which had come out after It’s a Wonderful Life, but sometimes he wasn’t sure.
“What do you mean by that, boss,” asked Alf, shifting deeper into his well-upholstered, red chair. His boss told him.
“We can’t do that!” said Alf.
The Big Man smiled drolly. “Of course we can,” he said.
That week, the Big Man was in what Alf considered to be a phase of denial. At least, he could often be heard remarking things like, “Everyone knows the polling on this kind of thing is unreliable.” Once, he told Alf that it didn’t matter whether or not human beings believed in him, because, “I’m real whether they like it or not.”
When Alf pointed out that they still had a problem on their hands, his boss said that he didn’t care “whether they believe in me, because I know I exist.”
Alf had to admit that his boss had a point, and he wondered again whether his boss had been reading about philosophy, or maybe it was one of those theo- words this time – theodicy or theosophy or – but just thinking about that made Alf’s head hurt. And when he looked up those theo- words in the dictionary, he decided they didn’t have to anything to do with his boss.
That Friday, the entire North Pole entered The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, otherwise known as the busiest time of the year. In the central square of Polar City, there was a gigantic billboard with “T Minus 25” written on it. The next day, this would be changed to “T Minus 24.”
Alf could remember a time when the billboard had read “T – 25,” but this generated great confusion among the elven population, half of whom thought that meant, “T 25,” or “the 25th T,” or some other nonsense. So, the word “minus” had been spelled out so that the entire city was aware that it wasn’t a dash. After that, the only confusion came from the occasional teenage elf, who asked who “T Minus” was and whether his music was available on Spotify.
Alf could barely remember those days, but he hadn’t been a teenager since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Elves lived a very long time, which Alf thought gave them some perspective on human affairs. For one thing, his boss probably had a point about human beings. They believed some new foolish thing every year, so the fact that they didn’t believe in his boss this year didn’t necessarily mean anything. In ten years, they’d either believe in him again, or they’d believe the Easter Bunny would deliver their Christmas presents, or maybe they’d believe they could finally solve the planning problem and coordinate the mass distribution of toys all over the world in a single night by themselves.
His boss used to like to joke about this. “You know,” he’d say, “I don’t actually have to do anything. All I have to do is literally nothing and as long as the humans don’t try to do anything on purpose, they’ll have all the toys they want on Christmas.”
“Yes, boss, but they don’t know that,” Alf would respond, which his boss thought was a good point.
“I suppose they would rather believe that a single individual has to be responsible for efficiently putting the right toy in every child’s hand in a single night.”
Alf would point out that this was, in fact, exactly what would happen, because inevitably the humans would do something stupid and his boss would have to go and set things right. And then when every child woke up to the sight of a miracle, the humans would take credit for something his boss had done.
“That’s the price of working in the shadows, I guess.”
“Indeed. You’d think they’d eventually wise up to the fact that they don’t have any control over any of this.”
But they didn’t. And now they didn’t even believe in his boss, which technically made his boss’s job both easier and harder at the same time. It certainly made Alf’s job harder. His boss was talking a big game about what would have to happen on the Big Night this year.
“Let’s just say they won’t be able to help believing in me after this.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’ll find a way to believe what they want to believe, boss.”
“Hmm. D’you think so?”
“They always do, sir.”
When Zero Day (December 24th) drew closer, the Big Man assembled a cadre of his top elves in a top-secret briefing room in central Polar City – a room which some of the elves had taken to calling, “the Situation Room.”
“Normally,” began the boss when all the elves had arrived, “we try to fly under the radar. Not this year. This year… yes, what is it, Calvin?”
The elf who had raised his hand said, “Sir, aren’t you worried about ballistic missiles?”
“No. Why would I be?”
The boss looked around the room, but nobody cared to comment on this. “Very well,” he continued. “I shall continue. This year, we are going for maximum visibility. We can’t take any chances. In most years, we spend endless sums on trying to become invisible. We try to avoid any detection, and we especially try to avoid being recorded anywhere. Any witnesses who can claim to having seen us must be under the age of ten, or otherwise uncredible. Heck, some of you have even performed advanced cleanup missions in the wee hours of Christmas morning. I thought we did a good job covering up that unfortunate sighting in Roswell, New Mexico during one of my mid-year practice runs a couple years ago.”
“Sir, that was nearly eighty years ago.”
“Whatever you say. More recently, some of you have even gone so far as to alter the memory of particular individuals… and I need say no more about that.”
The Big Man paused and looked about the room. You could hear a Christmas cookie drop. In fact, had you been there, you would have heard a Christmas cookie drop, as one of the elves near the back had missed lunch and had been surreptitiously trying to pull a cookie out of his pocket when he fumbled it.
“This year,” the Big Man went on, “We will have none of that. We want maximum exposure.”
Alf winced at this unfortunate choice of wording, but none of the other elves seemed to notice it.
“We will be on every channel. I want to be on Blackberry videos, home camcorders, those little disposable film things you pick up in the pharmacy, and every instrument of every advanced warning system of every country on the planet.”
Alf didn’t have the heart to tell him that the humans weren’t using Blackberries and camcorders anymore.
“Does anyone see any problems with this plan?”
Alf could see several, including that the plan didn’t seem to have many details. But he’d been through enough reindeer rodeos to know that his boss’s plans usually involved a good bit of filling in the gaps on the fly. One elf near the back raised a hand.
“Why are we doing all of this?” he asked.
Alf doodled little pine trees on his notepad while he waited for his boss to answer, but then he heard the Big Man cough. He looked up. The boss was looking at him, clearly expecting him to field this one. He stood up hastily.
“They, well, the humans that is… let me start over, my apologies,” blurted out Alf.
“We received multiple reports at the beginning of the season this year that by and large the population of Earth no longer believes, well, in us. After lengthy hours of consultation, we have decided that this is a problem requiring… drastic measures. After all, if they stop believing in us, next thing you know they’ll believe in, well…” Alf trailed off as he realized that the main candidates for finishing this sentence already had constituencies in the public at large, which only served to prove his point, he thought.
“Little green men,” he said, hoping that this was still ludicrous enough to be beyond human belief.
“Like from another planet?” asked one elf.
“Or you mean the ones impersonating human beings at the highest levels of every world government?” said another.
“Whatever,” said Alf. “The point is, this year we need to go in with a bang. We need all eyes on us. On the Big Man, that is. All of you are, as usual, to remain behind the scenes.”
There was some mumbling from the ranks about not getting any credit, “as usual,” but Alf reminded them that that was the job and they knew that when they signed up. Which was a euphemism, of course, since their profession was one you were born into, not one you chose, but at least this worked to quiet the mumbling.
When the big night came, the entire population of Polar City turned out to see the Big Man off. Alf would be riding alongside the boss tonight, although this was a break from tradition.
The sleigh had been brushed and polished and the reindeer had been fed the traditional Christmas Eve meal of eggnog and a porterhouse steak. Technically the reindeer were vegetarian, but then again since they ate the steak, technically they weren’t. Twenty years ago, around the time the younger elves were prevailing upon the Big Man to quit smoking, some elf had thought to ask whether the reindeer should really be drinking eggnog before a big flight. The Big Man had said that they didn’t need to see straight, only he did, and although this didn’t make any sense, there had never been any accidents. Except for that time in Roswell, but nobody talked about that. Besides, no eggnog had been involved then.
The Big Man had gained some extra weight this year. Normally, he was a bit on the leaner side, especially by American standards, but he had expectations to meet this year and nobody would believe he was who he said he was if he was thin. The reindeer, by contrast, were fighting lean. They’d been flying one hundred thousand miles a week for the last three months and they’d need to fly over a million tonight. Alf had once calculated that they burned an estimated seventy-four thousand calories each between sunset and sunrise on Christmas Eve, but they also ate approximately forty-two thousand carrots each during that time, so it balanced out. Alf was hoping there wasn’t a carrot deficit this year. He wondered how much they should count on the goodwill and hospitality of people who didn’t believe in flying reindeer. It wouldn’t be good to crash-land in the plains of Iowa because Donner and Blitzen hit the wall.
He packed along a tin of reindeer fudge, just in case. A single gram of this fudge had two thousand calories and the equivalent amount of caffeine as thirty cups of coffee. It had gotten them through many a grim and cold Christmas Eve before, although Alf suspected that his boss did most of the eating of it.
The snow was thick on their way out of Polar City, and Rudolph took a wrong turn. They ended up flying over Siberia before transiting the Atlantic and entering Canadian airspace. The Big Man had decided not to bother the Canadians tonight, at least on the way south. He wanted to make New York City before nine pm.
“It would be even better if we make it by eight,” he told Alf. “We want the maximum number of eyeballs. Prime time on all the networks.”
As soon as they crossed the border near Niagara Falls, the Big Man gave the order to Alf.
“Cloak down.”
But Alf didn’t need to be told. He had already terminated all spoofing and jamming. Immediately, his boss began executing wild flight maneuvers, jerking the reins this way and that so that Rudolph and the other eight reindeer whirled and flipped in the sky. They wanted to make sure they showed up on every radar screen in North America.
“Do you think they’re tracking us, yet?”
“Let’s hope.”
“Alright, we’re making straight for New York. We’ll see if they catch on to us. We’ll give NORAD something real to track this year.”
The headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command was a good place to be on Christmas Eve. It was always the best night of the year. Every employee wanted to volunteer to put on a show of tracking Santa for the kids. Tonight though, several senior employees were gathered in a conference room while being briefed by the top analyst.
“Let me get this straight,” said the commander of NORAD, who was wishing she was at home with her children, “you’re telling me we’re picking up something in upstate New York, which just entered our airspace in the last hour, which according to you looks like…”
“I know it sounds ridiculous.”
“A sleigh? And nine reindeer?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve got the secretary of defense on hold right now,” she gestured to a phone on the desk, “and you want me to tell him we’re picking up Santa and his sleigh on Christmas Eve? NORAD tracks Santa except that we really are tracking something and it really does appear to be a jolly fat man from the North Pole?”
“Look, I’m just telling you what we’re picking up. I can’t say whether…”
“Do you have any idea how much of a joke this sounds like?”
“Well…”
“Would you care to venture an opinion as to whether the Chinese or the Russians are doing this? The director of the CIA seems to think they live in our systems. It would be some joke to give NORAD a real Santa to track on Christmas Eve.”
“Ma’am, I can’t make that kind of call.”
“Hold on,” she said, and picked up the phone. When the defense secretary answered, she told him the situation.
“Yes, that’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Yes, I thought of that, too. Yes, if the Russians or the Chinese wanted to hit New York City it would make sense to blow some smoke. Yes, that’s what I thought, too. Yes, ICBMs seem a bit of overkill for Christmas Eve. Yes, I remember. No, we won’t take any chances. Okay, so you’ll have the fighters scrambled? Okay, we will continue to track this thing. No, of course I don’t really think it’s Santa Claus. Yes, I have children, but what’s that got to do with it? Ok, Merry Christmas to you, too. Oh, I apologize, I didn’t know. Well, then happy holidays. Thank you.”
“I think it worked, boss,” said Alf, as cold air whistled past his face.
“What makes you say that?” roared the Big Man as wind whipped his white beard past his ears. They were close to Mach 1 now.
Alf pointed off to the right. “Because I can see the fighters coming to intercept us,” he said.
“Ah, good,” said the Big Man. “Ahead of schedule.”
Two F-35s roared up beside them. Alf turned his head to see if he could see inside the cockpit of the one on his right. He wondered what the pilot was thinking. He wondered whether the pilot thought he was hallucinating.
“Bet we’re giving him a fright right about now,” said Alf.
“What do you mean? Surely, he must have figured out who we are?”
“Sir, they don’t believe in us,” yelled Alf.
“Well, they can see us, can’t they?” roared his boss over the noise of the jets.
Alf was beginning to really struggle to hear his boss. “What’s that got to do with it?” he shouted. But he could tell the Big Man hadn’t heard him.
The two jets flanked them as they began their descent into New York. They had slowed considerably, but they were still flying faster than most airliners.
“Do you think they’ll open fire on us, sir?” he yelled over the roar.
“’Course not! Why would they do that?” came back the faint reply.
“They might not take any chances. At this speed, we could take down the Empire State Building and keep on going.”
At that moment, the pilot on Alf’s right was in radio contact with his immediate superior, who was telling him the order had come from above to shoot the craft down. He called it a “craft.” Everyone was steadfastly avoiding the word “sleigh.”
“You’re telling me to shoot down what appears to be Santa and his sleigh on Christmas Eve?” the pilot asked.
“How old are you? Don’t tell me you believe that’s what that is. It’s a drone. Probably out of China. Whatever they’re doing to our sensors, it’s perfect. We can’t detect any spoofing.”
“Sir, it looks exactly like Santa Claus and a sleigh full of toys.”
“How many reindeer are there?” his officer asked sarcastically.
“Nine. The one in front has a red nose.”
“The Chinese watch American television. They know who Rudolph is. Open fire.”
“Sir…”
“That’s an order. We can’t afford to take chances. You’re probably too young to remember…”
Part Two will be released tomorrow. It will be paywalled, so please subscribe if you’d like to read the rest.