Play It Where It Lands

     Here's a movie premise:

     Obamaland.  The former president works on his golf swing.  Desert air, palm trees, intense blue sky.  Wife phones Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, has her toenails done.  Their rich life is unaffected by the new administration.  A test flight of an exotic futuristic aircraft at Nevada's Area 51 tears a rent in the spacetime continuum.  Obama's golfball disappears in midair, becomes a mini-moon orbiting a gas giant in another star system thirty-five light years away.  A research team of aliens resembling land squid with legs and arms note the sudden appearance of the pocked spheroid with this written on it:

                                                                               Titleist
                                                                                   1

     They retrieve it, study it, speculate that it may be a space vessel containing tiny entities.  Many mysterious objects appear in their star system.  The golfball gets stored in a bin in a research laboratory.  Obama, unable to locate his ball, persuades the NSA, using his dry, meandering voice, to use one of its satellites to find the lost ball.  Thirteen strays are located on the golf course, but none of them lie in the vicinity where the former president's ball might plausibly have landed.
     Puzzled, Obama spends six hours using his naked eyes searching for the ball.  This involves more walking and standing than he's done in nearly a decade.  Pooped and overheated, he returns to the presidential suite and stares at a coffee table, filling a comfortable pastel pink armchair for two hours while his wife talks on the phone about Mr. and Mrs. Trump with Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga.
     Hearing his wife talk to Lady Gaga, Obama perks up.  He likes the singer's tune, "Poker Face," since it reminds him of his own face; how he could, as president, praise a champion NBA team and also talk about torture while using the same blank facial expression.  He wonders if a jaunt to Las Vegas, a mere 200 miles or so from Palm Springs, might yield reward at a high stakes poker tournament.  It would be something to do.  Right before handing the country over to Trump, he told some journalist that he wanted to spend time "being quiet."  Doing nothing in a luxury resort has begun to irritate him.  When idle, his mind tends to wander to picturing civilians' ruined bodies after drone strikes.  It occurs to him, too, that Winston Smith is actually the sympathetic character in Nineteen Eighty-Four, not the villain.
     The missing golfball, nestled within a foam-padded metal box in a laboratory's supply room at a research station on an airless moon of a gas giant orbiting Zeta Herculis B, will vex Obama for the rest of his life.  Every golf game will become an obsession to keep meticulous track of not only his ball, but everyone else's on the course.

                                                                               Vic Neptune