But the advertising voices all around our car are drowning everything out. We pass through dioramas of ourselves in cubicles, watch time-lapse movies of ourselves working, aging, working, seeing what we look like at work, seeing how the hands of the clocks in our offices spin around, and somewhere about that point we notice that our lap bars have tightened against our thighs. It could be the slow spread of middle age, and the growth of our daughter, who is in college now, and of our son, who as a sophomore made the varsity soccer team at his high school and is now taller than all of us.

But it’s not that we have grown; the lap bars really did click down tighter on us, pinning us into this car, pinching us into our seats, and the voice tells us it is for our safety, as the ride is picking up speed now. With a sick feeling in our guts, we understand that we are not getting out of this ride until it lets us off, and that the reason we are picking up speed is that we are now on a down slope, that somewhere we did pass the high point of the ride. None of us remembers doing that, or even there being a particularly high point, or maybe the high point just wasn’t very high, but whatever the case, we are accelerating now. Whatever we built up in terms of momentum, we are now giving it back.

The idea is, the hope is, that we will be able to see everything at least once, that even in this rushed state we can experience all of the rooms, even if it is from a distance. We can see other cars moving across the country, across “America”—we see all of us on grids, on graphs. We understand ourselves to be bits of socioeconomic data on the bar charts and pie charts and flowcharts running down the leftmost column of the multicolored newspapers that get left in front of the room doors of our discount business traveler hotels. We understand ourselves to be frequent fliers, rewards club members, customer loyalty program participants.

We dream publicly. We have agencies, staffed by people who storyboard our fantasies, people who plan out, panel by panel, shot by shot, the public space, the collective mental environment where this ride is located. Creative agencies mapping the conceptual territory, the shared Main Street of our imaginations, where we stroll, arm in arm, down the avenue of our engineered dreams, our civic conversation now just saying to ourselves, Hey, look at this, look at this, and we all look at this for ten seconds until another one of us says, Now hey wait a minute, have you guys seen this, look at this, look at this one now, and we all turn our heads and look at this one now, until the next thing, the next thing, our collective attention reduced to the briefest of intervals, not long enough or large enough to hold a dream.

And then, soon, no more public dreaming. Just expertly conceived narrative products designed to keep us inside the car, looking out the side, murals painted in 2D to give 3D illusion of movement, the sweep of history that we have purchased, that we are part owners of, murals that show us watery images of ourselves, murals with frames around them, to give off the feelings of “Nostalgia” and “Tradition” and “Affordable Luxury” and “Forward Progress” and “Special Times” and “Beer and Friends.” We have no room for dreams or even feelings anymore, our feelings now engineered, designed by people who have market-researched us and seen our private browser histories and know what is in our darkest of hearts and in our darkest of parts, and know what we really want deep down, all of those feelings calibrated to be emotionally nutritious, or at least emotionally fattening, calorically dense psychosocial-experiential sustenance, allotted into our feed troughs, constituting our collective body, so that we are what we consume, and we consume what we are, so that we are a loop, closed and tight and perfect.

So we stay focused on what has been laid out before us, moving room to room. We have to admit, sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, we hear ourselves talking and we become terrified at the sound of our own voice, still so strange and dumb after all these years. Occasionally we wish we didn’t have these kids yet and that we could go back to the days when it was just us, and all we had to worry about was just not falling out of the ride, what kind of snacks we would eat, what souvenirs we would buy. We admit to ourselves that we wish we didn’t have either of them, not because we don’t love them but because we love them too much. We see ourselves on the in-ride camera, taking pictures of us that we will be able to purchase, for $29.95 per print, at the end of the journey, pictures of ourselves at an earlier time: We are looking at our family, all sitting together. Now where are they? Where have our kids gone?

We search desperately for our daughter, search desperately for our son, the ride is coming to an end for us, and, turning our heads from the side, our necks stiff from having been locked into a position of gazing for so long, we realize what we have just done. We look forward for the first time in years and see the white light outside ahead as we exit this room. We look at the in-ride camera and see our son, and see our daughter, see them in their own cars, with their own sons and their own daughters, and we want to call out to them, to our children and our grandchildren, but it’s just an image, and we understand that, but we call out to them anyway.

We try to explain to them about the ride, but we see the looks on their faces, the hope, and we start to understand the impossibility of this ride, how it is a kind of perpetual escalator, a physical impossibility that somehow exists. We see how our children and our grandchildren think that they are on an up slope, believe in the forward movement that they can feel. We wish we could ride the ride again that way. We see the looks on our grandkids’ faces, except that they are not looking at the ride, they are looking at their parents’ faces, just as our kids looked at ours, seeing how excited their parents are, and being excited by that, and also knowing already how to give their parents what they seem to need. The kids knew all along. Our daughter is in another car, far away, on an up slope, waving to us. Our son is with his family, and gives us a sad smile.

They know already how the ride works, but they need to show their own kids. The idea is, the hope is—we don’t know how those sentences were supposed to end, and we are now sure that we never knew how they ended. And we see that the sentences have no more to them. That’s all they are. The idea is. The hope is. And that hope is with us as we move toward the large exit doors into the next room, that hope fills us.

 

AT THE BEGINNING of my last week on Earth, possibly ever, a little rocket ship comes crashing through the clouds, skidding and sliding and scaring up a dust storm and finally stopping about a hundred yards from the shop. I put on my enviro-suit and go out to see what it’s all about. The little ship’s escape hatch pops open, and out steps a guy, possibly my age or close to it, and an older dude who looks just like him. Matt Jones and his dad, Marvin, they say, by way of introduction. I say, “Marvin as in Marvin the Martian?” and Matt laughs a little, but Marvin laughs just a little too hard, and that should be my first clue that these two space cowboys are not your average tourists.

“I think our ship might need some repairs,” Marvin says, and I take a look at the small electrical fire melting the antigravity compressor, and I say, “Yes sir, Mr. Marvin Jones, I think you may be right.”

I tell them my mom can fix it. Might as well come into the shop while I call. I’ve hardly seen another human all summer—the Kuiper Belt has been active, which always backs up traffic coming this way, and on top of that there have been flashy electrical storms on Io, all of which adds up to a very slow summer here at the home planet.

“Where’re you guys headed?” I ask.

Matt says the Hilton.

“Overlooking the Sea of Tranquillity,” I say. Southern rim. Nice.

“You know it?” he asks.

“No,” I say, “I’ve seen pictures.” I explain that my mom works on the dark side of the moon.

“And your dad?” Mr. Jones asks.

“No dad,” I say, and it gets quiet.

The phone rings a couple more times and then goes to voice mail. “Hey, Mom’s voice mail. It’s Jane, your only child, and the last person on Earth. Listen, we’ve got a couple of road warriors here, crashed their little planet hopper, and we might need you to come down here with your tools.”

I hang up the phone. “Well,” I say, “the good news is that I’m sure she can fix your ship. The bad news is that she probably can’t be here until Sunday.”

“What’s Sunday?” Matt says, and I start to explain, “Well, today’s Friday …,” but then I remember that these are humans, but not Earthlings. They don’t have workweeks. They don’t even have weeks.

“Sunday means you’re stuck here for a while. Stranded on Earth.”

“Cool,” Matt says, and I actually think he means it.

They browse in the store for a while and then I figure they’re getting hungry, so I take them over to the diner and give them a couple of menus while I go into the kitchen and fire up the grill. I watch them through the order window, sitting in the booth, plugging credits into the jukebox. “Earth Angel,” “Blue Moon,” “Moon River.”

“There’s a Moon Out Tonight,” by the Capris.

I tie on my server’s uniform and head back out to take their orders: two burgers, onion rings, chocolate shakes.

“Just so we’re clear,” I remind them, “there are no cows left on Earth. The meat in the burgers is printed by a top-of-the-line fabricator.”

“Cool,” they say.

“Same with the chocolate in the shake. The onion rings are real, though. And they’re actually pretty good.”

I print them a couple of burgers, and print one for myself, too, and then decide to wash it down with an egg cream, so I have that while they drink their fake shakes. We all sit and look out the window at the past.

I explain to them about the park, how it’s been shut down ten years. Back in the day, there were rides and shows and exhibits and a parade every night. “Every night?” “Yeah. A nightly parade. Can you imagine? Every single night—and then, at the end of the parade, get this, fireworks. And the craziest thing was that there was actually one exhibit, ‘Anytown, USA.’ It was America, early in the twenty-first century. Yeah, a thousand years ago, something like that.”

“Oh,” Matt says. “I read about that in the guidebook. There were people living in the exhibit, right?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Supposedly.”

Matt pulls out Earth: A Guide Book, reads from a dog-eared page. The inhabitants of “Anytown, USA” were born and raised in the park, lived their whole lives there.

“Can you believe that?” Matt says. “Their way of life had ended. They just hadn’t heard the news yet.”

After dinner, I drive them over to the motel in one of the Park Pods, show them their rooms.

“Get settled in for the night,” I say. “After sunset, the dust storms will kick up and you’re not going to want to be outside. If anything comes up,” I tell them, “just give me a buzz. I’ll be in the manager’s quarters downstairs.”

I head back to the shop to finish closing up. It’s late when I get back to my room. Before going to sleep, I call my mom.

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I miss you.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

If she has to work, why not follow me to Jupiter? Plenty of jobs there. If she doesn’t like the crowds, then one of its moons. Close enough that I could come home from school on the weekends. We could go to the mall, the movies, restaurants. Like normal people.

I go heat up a Hot Pocket in the manager’s office for a late-night snack. Hot Pockets remind me of my dad, because they were the only thing he knew how to cook, so when Mom was off working late, this is what my father made me for dinner.

Where is he? Last seen in the Kuiper Belt, collecting scrap and minerals. Was he smashed by an asteroid? Crushed by space trash?

Or maybe he was sucked into a wormhole, out of this universe and into another one, one where he has some other life, some other family, some completely new rules for space and time. My distant dad, even if we could see him, somehow spot him in the heavens, we’d be looking at him in the past. The light carrying information about him reaching me now would be old light, out of date, would tell us nothing about him today.

And yet. Mom. Still holding on. Her life with him has ended, she just hasn’t chosen to receive that message yet.

A LITTLE AFTER TWO in the morning, I wake up to hear someone stomping around on the roof. I can guess who it is. I get into my suit, climb up there with a small flashlight in my mouth and a baseball bat, just in case, but when I get up there it’s not Matt. It’s Mr. Jones.

“Hey,” he says.

“Oh hey,” I say.

He says “You were expecting Matt” and I say “Yeah kinda.” I tell him I’m very sorry and the customer is always right, but motel policy is that he can’t be up here. He goes to climb down, then pauses at the ladder and says “Can I ask you a question?”

I say sure.

“Have you ever been over there?” he says, and I say “Over where?” but I know what he means.

“You know,” he says. “The park.”

“Um, yeah, no,” I say, and he says “Seriously? Why not?” And I tell him it’s locked and he says “But surely you must have a key” and I say “Well, yeah, I don’t know, I think there are robots guarding it” and he says “But aren’t you curious?”

And I say “Yeah, of course, but I mean, it’s an amusement park. It’s entertainment,” I say.

He says “Exactly. That’s why it’d be so awesome.”

I’m not sure I follow.

He says “Yeah you do. It’s a story, but not just any story. It’s the one that humans, given the chance, wanted to tell about themselves for the future. It’s our origin myth.”

“More like a fantasy,” I say, and he says “Same thing. Plus, don’t you know, Jane?” I say “What?”

He says you learn things about people from their fantasies.

I say “Maybe so, Mr. Jones.”

I remember one thing I don’t miss about humans: The male ones can be creepy. Whatever. He’ll be gone by Sunday morning.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “I’m leaving soon.” I tell him that I’m off to college on Jupiter.

He says: “All the more reason to see history while you can.”

THAT NIGHT, I DREAM about what it would be like to have lived there, in some Disney version of civilization. To have lived in a bubble. Physically, culturally, psychologically, for their whole lives. They didn’t know better. Even the adults. So what is it? How did they keep them there? How did they never wonder? Some controlled environment, no doubt. Maybe they pumped in gas, kept them sedated. Piped in music, like a soundtrack for reality.

Or they knew. And still chose to stay.

I imagine someday, when I’m far away from Earth, after Jupiter, after I’ve gotten my degree and then maybe a Ph.D. at a university in the Vega system, I can come back here, as an archaeologist, promoting my book. Earth: Your Next Vacation. Or Earth: Not as Bad as You’ve Heard. Or something like that. I haven’t totally landed it yet.

And I can give a talk, here, in the motel by the gift shop, and lead a tour of the place where it all started. We’d need a bubble. I could fabricate pieces in the warehouse, put them together into a dome. We could use the rover, assuming my mom can fix it, hitch it to our dome—a DIY tour bus. I can see them now, excited, taking pictures. And out of the crowd of faces, all eagerly listening to me speak intelligently and with great erudition about the cradle of human intergalactic society, I spot one face in particular—my dad. It’s not easy to recognize him at first, because, like a weirdo, he’s got his enviro-suit helmet on, as if he’s still in space, as if he’s just moving through, just stopped by to use the restroom and grab a sandwich and just happened to catch the tour. But as I continue to give the tour, he’s watching me with great interest, taking in all of the facts and histories that I’m narrating, and my dad, he has this look on his face, almost like he doesn’t know me, but also maybe like he’s pretending to be a stranger, pretending to be a tourist just moving through my head, a visitor in my dream, so he can watch me from afar, and it also maybe looks like he’s really proud of what I have become, in this shared dream of my future.

I FEEL LIKE I’M still asleep the next morning when the phone rings.

“Jane,” the voice says. Sounds vaguely familiar.

“Who’s calling?” I say.

“It’s your mother,” the voice says, and I say “Oh yeah, I thought that was you.” She says “What, are you drunk? You’re nineteen.” I say “Mom, come on, you know I don’t drink. Plus, where would I get alcohol? We ran out of beer ages ago. I tell her I was just having a really intense dream.

“About Dad?” she says.

“No, Mom,” I say, only half lying, and I say, “Not everything is about Dad, you know,” and I regret it almost as soon as the words start coming out of my mouth, and now I know we’re either about to get into an argument or she’s going to start crying, or both, but then we’re interrupted by banging at the door.

My mom says “What was that?” and I say “I don’t know, I’d better go check it out.” She says “Be careful,” and I say “Okay, Mom,” and I tell her I love her, and then I open the door and it’s Mr. Jones and he is seriously freaking out.

“Matt’s gone,” he says, and he doesn’t have to say any more, as we both know where he is.

SO THIS IS HOW I end up going into Earth: A Theme Park for the first time: at six in the morning.

Riding in a Park Pod, with a strange grown man.

Looking for his thirteen-year-old son who has, apparently, run off with the other Park Pod.

“Matt’s old enough to know better,” I say.

“Exactly,” Mr. Jones says. “Old enough to know an adventure when he sees one.”

And I say, “Wait a minute, I thought you were freaking out. You’re glad he ran off? Wait just a minute,” I say, starting to freak out a little bit myself. “Did you two plan this?”

He says “Don’t be crazy,” and I mostly believe him but am still not totally sure that this wasn’t their scheme all along. That maybe, hard as it is to believe, they crashed here on purpose, with some crazy idea in their heads about what it would be like to roam around in a closed, artificial environment that has been reclaimed by wild animals (the ones that have survived, albeit with adaptations) and is policed by security robots so badly in need of software upgrades that who knows what they’re capable of doing.

I’m trying to explain all this to Mr. Jones the whole way over, and he’s not having any of it, he’s just enjoying it, I can tell, and it’s not until we enter the park, through an aperture in the electromagnetic force field (which keeps out radiation and bears and dust and weather, and generally makes the park habitable, or should, if it still works after a thousand years)—and the Park Pod’s thrusters activate and we’re flying about ten feet off the ground, and we can see how big the park is, and how many places Matt could get lost, or killed, or just, you know, accidentally die—that Mr. Jones starts to realize for himself what Matt has gotten himself into and he gets quiet for a second, and he actually goes, “Oh.” And I say, “Yeah, exactly.”

We search for Matt throughout the park, which means, whether we like it or not, we also learn a great deal about Earth’s history. Or at least the corporate version of the narrative, through the various exhibits and the constant voice over the PA system. At one point, we spot his Park Pod parked outside America: The Ride, and we make the decision to get out of our Park Pod and enter that ride, snaking through the chained-off rows where people used to line up, pushing through the turnstile, having, in all of this, some small thrill in actually doing it. We enter the dark, low structure, snaking around the barriers meant for long lines, but can’t find him, and by the time we reemerge from the building, Matt’s Park Pod is gone, and a security robot is driving away with ours and Mr. Jones starts to shout but I cover his mouth and say, “Are you crazy? That thing might shoot us or, worse, take us to the holding cell in the park’s police station, and then what are we going to do?” So we watch the security robot hover away with our only hope of finding Matt.

Now on foot, we trudge through midday and into afternoon, fortifying ourselves with 3D-printed corn dogs and 3D churros and neon-blue Icee drinks, and we cover mile after mile, acres of park space, every building, lamppost, wall, sign, screen, automated learning kiosk, game, flashing display, educational bot, every single thing in the park trying to tell us a story about our roots as a species, trying to teach us something.

Oh, and trying to sell us stuff, too.

As the sun sets, we start to panic, Mr. Jones and me, both of us, we both try to keep it to ourselves, but we start to panic this low-grade, silent panic. My mother will be arriving on Earth tomorrow morning, and she can fix their ship, but that’s not going to be of much good to Mr. Jones if he can’t find his son.

And then the parade starts. And it’s fantastic: a reenactment of some of Earth’s greatest treasures. There are floats for all of the major cultural figures of the twentieth century. And the fireworks are legitimately impressive—all the more so because they are rendered on a computer screen. Robots operate every aspect of it while we sit under a dome, enclosed inside the electromagnetic field, which, against all odds, seems to be working fine. I’m thinking, that’s actually kind of impressive. And then I see Matt. Marching in the parade, alongside the floats.

We chase him down, and he’s glad to see us, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from kicking him in the pants. His dad is just so relieved he can barely speak.

“We’ve been looking for you,” I say. “A little bit.”

“Matt,” Mr. Jones finally says. “What the hell?”

“I’m sorry, guys,” Matt says. “But it’s been worth it.” He says, “Come on, I have something to show you.”

Matt leads us down Main Street, and then off on a side street, and then it’s getting dark and we’re off the track for the Park Pods and I wonder if this is even part of the park anymore. I suppose I’ll know if a mutant bear-dog jumps out and eats us. We cross a small town square, and there’s a post office and what looks like a hardware store, and then, down another street, after turning a corner, there it is: It’s a fully functioning simulation of a town.

Matt looks at us, watching us take it in, just as he must have taken it in earlier in the day.

America, once upon a time. Not robots. Not images. Real people, living here, working here, raising families here. Dying here. Whole lives, in this pretend existence, oblivious to the world. Wanting to be, needing to.

We find a large tree to stand under, kind of hide behind, so we can watch them all from down the block.

I wonder: How big is the town? How are they self-sufficient? How could they not know?

But even as I think it, I understand: No one needs help with illusions. People are plenty good at it. People want to know as much as they want to know. They have learned, on some not-quite-conscious level, to avoid places where they might run into the truth—they’ve developed an intuitive sense of how not to pop their own bubble. To keep the dream going.

Even as, on some level, there’s something underneath the surface, a kind of baseline unease about it all. Their homes, their streets, their town. The world feels inauthentic, maybe, but they can’t quite figure out why. For all they know, anyone knows, it’s all a big theme park. For all anyone knows, this is just how life is supposed to feel.

So, every night, they have a parade, and fireworks, not realizing that their history is built on an illusion. That whatever they had—some nostalgia for some imagined past—is borrowed. That their way of life is over. Either they don’t know it or they’re not ready to admit it yet.

In the morning, my mom will arrive on Earth. Fix the Joneses’ ship. They’ll pack up, leave. Drop the occasional postcard. Promise to stay in touch, and actually will. Nothing less. But nothing more, either. When she gets here, I’ll say, “He’s gone, Mom. Dad’s gone.”

My mom will ask: “Okay, what now?” I’ll say: “Maybe it’s time we break our bubble.”

THE SUMMER’S OVER, but by next spring they’ll be back. From far away, they will come. Poke around the shop, pick things and smile. They’ll buy something, use the restroom, get back in their ships. Maybe they just want to be able to say they came here, to have touched the ground here, breathed the air, looked at the moon the way people must have done nine or ten or a hundred thousand years ago. So they can say to their friends, if only for a moment or two: I was a human on Earth.

A voice booms over the PA. Welcome back! We were closed for a while, figuring some stuff out. We have Maria Callas. We have music and poetry and junk and we don’t know what else. Some other stuff. We have a new exhibit, called “The Age of Figuring Out What Age This Is.” We’ve got some work to do.

And then the fireworks start. For a little while, we’re back in the golden age, the glory days, and I can imagine how good this life was, how good we humans had it, and didn’t even know. For a little while, I enjoy the explosions.