Major Smith suddenly wheeled about, there in his yellow kitchen, wheeled like a dervish stopped in mid-whirl. He turned on his heel and returned to his refrigerator, where he opened the freezer. God, it was full of ice. He could barely get the drawer open. When was the last time he had defrosted? He moved a package of frozen corn, and a nearly empty box of popsicles. It was in here somewhere. He found it two drawers down, under a sack of ice cubes that had frozen into a solid brick: frozen bliss. He looked at the back of the box. Best before 2007, it said. He wondered if bliss could go bad. He put it into the microwave on low. Milk turned into yogurt. What would bliss turn into when it went bad? Joy? Euphoria? Rapture? He considered the difference between bliss and joy. He wished he had a dictionary in his house, and not all these thesauri.
The phone rang. His private phone. It was headquarters. The Secretary for Alien Spider affairs was on the line. Major Smith knew the score: the alien spiders who remained – and there were several – had taken to the oceans and made shipping unsafe because in the water they developed into huge, squid-like creatures that pulled tankers and cargo ships to the ocean floor, where sonar imaging and google maps discovered that they were being cemented into some sort of structure with some sort of natural adhesive that hardened into an impervious shell. What were they building down there, was the question. Their underwater city continued to grow. The alien spider squid continued to reproduce, although it was unknown how they did so, none had been dissected or observed laying eggs, giving live birth, dividing or mating. The alien spider squid soon discovered the Pacific Garbage Patch and added that to their structure in the space of days. Swoosh, like that, the oceans cleaned in days of centuries of mankind’s trash.
People were starting to get angry. What were these space alien spider squid up to? They were making us look bad, whatever they were. World leaders debated it in the UN but Russia and China vetoed it. Within a year the oceans were pristine and world petroleum reserves were depleted due to tankers being all gone. Giant space alien spider squid were found moving up rivers, plugging factory pipes with their impervious whatever it was. The streets filled with panicked masses as pollution rates fell below the lowest levels measured in centuries.
Major Smith looked at the bliss. Elation? he wondered. Maybe it was a halflife sort of thing when bliss went bad. The problem was, none of the definitions he had was any good for figuring out a difference between bliss, joy, and happiness. If bliss was ultimate joy, then maybe it decayed into joy when it went bad, and from there into happiness, but the definitions he had found struck him as describing things as a sort of differences of degrees thing when he was sure it was in fact a difference of quality.
He found a jar in the cupboard with a little happiness stuck to the inside walls. With a small spoon, he would be able to scrape some off if he was patient. He held the telephone between his shoulder and ear and moved his eyes from the microwave to the cupboard, and back, repeatedly, as one does when shifting ones attention between two alternatives as part of a decision-making process.
Major Smith decided to give bliss a try. If it was, in fact, that. It looked a lot like joy.
“Yes,” he said into the phone.