A Question to the Disbelieved
by Jeff King
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Near the end of September, Marjorie was wandering the school hallways after everyone had gone, looking for dishes that had been taken from the cafeteria and not returned.
The worst culprit was Principal Charles. He would often “grab a bite and run,” as he put it, throwing a couple of grilled cheese onto a plate and rushing from the room. The plates would always pile up, so Marjorie made a special point each month of checking his office. Today, he had left earlier than usual, so the office was empty. Marjorie slowly gathered the plates and bowls and cutlery into the small container she was holding. She smiled at the three mugs he had stuffed into a corner.
As she was about to leave, she noticed that his computer screen was turned on. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have even paused to look, but a word drew her attention. It appeared several times on the webpage, including at the very top in large letters. DOR. It was the transmission form.
Glancing upwards, she listened for a moment for anyone approaching, but it was silent. Unless there were still any teachers around, she was fairly sure that she was the only person in the school. She looked back at the screen and began to read. The form had been filled in with the school’s information and Principal Charles’s contact details. It even had his digital signature. Had he forgotten to click “Submit”? She thought of her boss: it was indeed possible. She scrolled down the page to the bottom where there was a large black box with a field in the middle. The box was labeled very simply: “Message for Dor.”
In the field in the box, Principal Charles had written the question that had been selected out of the hundreds of questions dreamed up by the Dor-obsessed students of the elementary school:
“Do you like to eat candy?”
Marjorie shook her head. She’d been appalled and bewildered when they had first announced the question as part of the shortlist two days previously. Aside from how inane the question was, she knew it had in fact been asked before. Now, sitting here, looking at it on this official form that represented to her the pinnacle of the world’s capacity for duplicity and self-deceit, she felt physically ill.
Abruptly, she pulled out Principal Charles’s soft leather chair and sat down. She positioned the pointer in the field and double-clicked. The question he had written was suddenly highlighted. Hesitating for only a second, she hit “Backspace” on the keyboard. It disappeared. Things were moving quickly now. With an incredible clarity she only became aware of later, she thought of all the questions she had dreamed up over the previous weeks. Was there something that might pull back the curtain to reveal the falsehood?
She paused and then typed a new question into the field slowly. After checking it twice over for mistakes, she did something Principal Charles had omitted to do: she clicked “Submit.”
* * *
Marjorie probably should not have been surprised when she got the call a week later to have a visit with Principal Charles. Of course, the submission would be timestamped and, of course, only the secretary would have noticed the discrepancy. Nonetheless, she did notice it and, having done so, she followed up with the school’s contact at the United Nations and discovered that the question that Marjorie had sent had nothing to do with candy. Marjorie passed the secretary’s desk nervously on the way in to meet with Principal Charles.
“I don’t think they’re meant to be philosophical, Marj,” the secretary sniffed without even looking up.
Principal Charles was, of course, disappointed with her. He blamed himself. With a sigh, he told Marjorie that they were grateful for all of her many decades of service, and then he handed her a letter of termination.
Of course, she thought, Dor claims another victim.
As she got up to leave, she turned to Principal Charles and mumbled, “I can tell the children the answer, you know. If that would help.”
Principal Charles shook his head, confused.
“The answer to their question about candy,” she clarified. “It’s a question that has already been asked, you know?”
Principal Charles frowned, “I highly doubt that—”
Marjorie smiled sadly. “It was asked in the fourth or fifth year, if I’m not mistaken. A group of juvenile offenders in the United Kingdom submitted it as a question. The Dorians said yes and then went on to describe something that sounded very much like our vegetables.”
Principal Charles half-grinned at this and nodded as if to bid her farewell.
Marjorie turned and left.
* * *
About nine months later, the school secretary called. She was wondering if Marjorie would be available to come and meet with Principal Charles. Her voice was cool and uncomfortably formal, but Marjorie agreed anyway.
She had never told anyone about how she lost her job. Not even her husband. With the exception of his secretary, Principal Charles had apparently kept it quiet as well. When Marjorie had gone into the school to collect some things the day after being terminated, Mr. Tweedle had said he was sad to hear that she had been cut due to lost funding. A lie to preserve her dignity. She was grateful.
Marjorie was fairly certain that the invitation wasn’t about getting her job back, though. The secretary’s voice was evidence enough of that. Had they involved the authorities somehow? Was there some further complication she hadn’t anticipated? A cold feeling suddenly filled her stomach as she reached for her sunglasses and left the house.
After she arrived, Principal Charles suggested that they go for a walk around the school. It was recess. Marjorie felt a wave of bittersweet delight as she watched the children playing. Every once in a while, an older child she would recognize would look up at her with a strange expression on his or her face. They knew her, too; they just didn’t know why.
“I wanted to talk with you about the question you sent to Dor,” Principal Charles muttered. “We’ve received an answer, and I thought it only fair that you hear the response.”
“I don’t understand — how did you receive a response? Didn’t someone stop my message from going out?” Marjorie was breathing more quickly now. She could feel her face flush.
“No, no,” Principal Charles said, laughing nervously. “We didn’t even realize you had submitted a different question until we had received a confirmation from the UNSA saying they had sent it.”
Marjorie was silent.
“Anyway, they did send it, and they received the responses last week. Ours was just processed, so I wanted to share it with you. For old time’s sake. Well, and actually, I wanted to ask you something else—”
Marjorie didn’t hear the last part of Principal Charles’s words because just at that moment a soccer ball came flying through the air and struck her hard against her ear. Principal Charles cried out and reached over to grab her so that she didn’t fall. He looked over to a group of three boys who had a mix of terror, concern, and utter apathy painted across their respective faces. Shouting at them to be more careful, he kicked the ball back towards them and then turned to help Marjorie into the school and his office.
“Are you all right?” Principal Charles asked gently as he helped Marjorie sit down in the chair across from his desk. He sent the secretary to get ice. “We don’t have to talk about any of this if you aren’t feeling up to it.”
Marjorie smiled weakly and shook her head, “I’m fine. Just a bit frazzled, that’s all. Boys playing... it’s so sweet.”
They sat quietly together, listening to the sounds of the children playing just outside Principal Charles’s window. The soccer game had resumed.
“I was always a bit confused by your question, I’ll admit,” Principal Charles said. “I’ve been wondering about it all year.”
Marjorie laughed mournfully, “It was a foolish thing to do. I’m not even sure I remember it anymore.”
Principal Charles didn’t respond for a moment. He took a deep breath.
“You asked, ‘Why do we feel so alone?’ I am sort of surprised it made it through, actually. The U.N. folks must have thought we were the weirdest elementary school in America,” Principal Charles said with a grunt. “I’m sure there are weirder ones, though.”
Why do we feel so alone? Marjorie was struck by her question and thought back to her state of mind when she asked it. Did she feel alone even now? Her ear was still ringing from the blow and she was having a hard time thinking clearly, but she knew the answer.
“What was the response?” Marjorie whispered.
“I thought it was a mistake at first, but apparently they just asked the same question back to us: ‘Why do we feel so alone?’ That was it.” He pulled a formal looking letter out of a folder on his desk and passed it across to Marjorie. Other than a short, boilerplate preamble, there were just two boxes on the page. The top one said, “Message for Dor,” just as she had seen on the original form. Her message was there as she had written it. The bottom box said, “Message for Earth.”
Why do we feel so alone?
An elegant answer, Marjorie thought. Also, a true one, whether it came from the other side of the galaxy or from the basement of a bunker in the U.N.’s headquarters where many of Marjorie’s fellow hoaxers believed a group of Ivy League grads were busily maintaining the world’s fragile peace.
“A universal question, I suppose,” Principal Charles said. He sighed and leaned back in his chair but had obviously come to the end of his allotted time for philosophizing. “At any rate, I wanted you to hear what we heard, and I’ll leave that with you. The other reason I wanted to chat with you, and I apologize this wasn’t made clear over the phone—”
The secretary entered with the ice at this exact moment and caught Principal Charles’s look of irritation. She smiled a half-apology at Marjorie and left the room. Pressing the ice against her head, Marjorie sighed in relief.
“This question and answer for the transmission are not going to cut it with our students. So, I was thinking back to the other thing you said to me before you left last time.”
Marjorie shook her head, confused.
“Vegetables!” Principal Charles said, his face bursting into a grin. “Or whatever you said the Dorians had told us in response to the question about candy all those years ago. My feeling is that we should just tell the kids that and be done with it. What do you say?”
“I’d be allowed to come back to work?”
“Yes, of course. It’s been impossible to find a replacement, to be honest. My mugs are stacking up. Besides, only the two of us in the office know about what you did, and we haven’t said anything.”
Marjorie must have made a face at this point, because the principal just shrugged and, glancing past Marjorie to where his secretary was sitting in the distance, said in a low voice, “I know she can be unpleasant, but I trust her.”
Marjorie pressed the cooling ice against her face again and closed her eyes. The sound of the children laughing and shouting on the other side of the window seemed to surround her. She could tell that many more of them had joined in the game. The bell rang, but the children just ignored the harsh din and kept playing.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeff King
