Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig perspective-dns.com. NS
Answer
perspective-dns.com. 5 NS henry.ns.cloudflare.com.
perspective-dns.com. 5 NS nora.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0