Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig direcnode.com. NS
Answer
direcnode.com. 4 NS jean.ns.cloudflare.com.
direcnode.com. 4 NS ken.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0