End of the World With Rob and Jack

From an email to Rob McCaskill

Dream last night. You and I and your friend Jack were having a series of adventures in Manhattan, making our way from uptown to The Battery over a course of several days. Elements of espionage, science fiction, comedy. The buildings and streets, the crowdedness, the juxtaposition of wealth and squalor, all these qualities so significant to the story they are almost characters. An utterly thrilling time. One narrow escape and fascinating encounter after another. I’d never had more fun. The three of us were amigos and partners, each adding something vital to our collective survival.

But clues were adding up. Jack was the first to see it. “This might not be real, guys. We might be in a simulation.” The ensuing debates. “If it’s fake, do we really want to be here? Do we all have to stay or leave together? How would we leave, anyway? How do we know the real thing is better than the fake thing?” And then a discovery that stuns us. It is indeed a simulation, and it ends on Sunday night—just half a day away. You and Jack suddenly remember your designated exits: post-hypnotic thought implants kicking in. You know where to go to exit back to real life. But not me. My thought implant has failed.

It put our friendship to the test. You both delay as long as you can to help me find a way out. Then it’s finally time for you both to head for your separate departure points uptown. A subway delay or a missed stop could mean the end of you. You’ve been good friends to delay even this long. Now you have your own possible annihilations to consider.

I decided to release you both. A “save yourselves” moment. But before I could do this, you were both gone. Merely lost in the crowd? Perhaps summoned back to reality a bit early by some unexpected change in protocol? 

There I was, alone at the end of the world. Just hours remaining. Everyone around me jubilant, anticipating their return to actual lives. Me anticipating nothing.

“Think, Tom, think.” A memory itched at me. I’d been through something like this before. When had that been? Reviewing my life at high speed, free-associating my way to a deeply hidden solution. A feat of athletic memory, Tom Cruise-like, in its way. And then I knew it. This was very like the problem of thinking you might be dreaming and trying to somehow know for sure. Hadn’t I learned to wake myself from dreams? Might not that ability work in this situation, too? Might that not be the loophole in the program that would save me?

“Be real!” I said. It was like trying to life weights with my voice. But I managed it. Those words woke me up in a bed, in a plain world. In my own mere bedroom. I had aged by 30 years in a second. Manhattan and youth were far, far away. “It’s just me. It’s just Missouri. It was just a dream.”

It was just plain life again, but it wasn’t doom. I wasn’t stuck in Battery Park, that end-of-the-line place, in a crowd of people preparing for reincarnation as I prepared for non-existence. I was still here in my life, with time left.

Plain old age and plain old Earth. “You might have to see the alternative first, but this isn’t bad.”

Then a wise realization, convincing as soon as you hear it, yet too weird for me to have ever come up with in a waking state. I was still half asleep, still receiving signals. “I’ve waited and waited for another good Woody Harrelson comedy. For ore of that backwoods joie de vivre, that hick aliveness. I just have to accept that such movie might never happen. I have to look for other ways to get those pleasures, or other pleasures to take their place.”