Recreations

Nelson Shake

The announcement came overhead that the simulation would end in ten minutes. I looked over at Brie to gauge what she was thinking. She had her back to me, taking it all in. The soft and thick knee-high grass, its green and yellow hues that shimmied as the wind whipped over the prairie. The massive oak next to us, its trunk and impossible expanse of branches that took you outside time. I noticed wildflowers for the first time, a detail that had certainly always been there, but, then again, there was the draw of the place: You never got to the bottom of it.

Brie stood rigid, and though I couldn’t see her face, something about her posture answered the question I would have asked. Her resolve made sense, especially after what she had discovered. So surprise isn’t quite what I felt. Sadness, perhaps, at knowing a close friend would not be coming back. But I don’t know that I could blame her.

It had been a week since Brie rushed over to my house in a blur of excitement. It was three in the morning, and when I asked her why it couldn’t wait, she said she didn’t want to talk about it over the phone because God knows that’s not where you have sensitive conversations. Taking her point, I turned my phone off when she kept nudging her eyes over to it.

We had both been home for the summer from college, left with nothing to do besides fixate on the obscene amounts of loan debt we were accruing, that hopeless cycle. We quickly came to look for any sort of distraction and settled on the simulations. They had opened earlier that winter to great fanfare, but the whole concept behind them struck us as contrived, another cash grab. Boredom, though, has a way of weakening moral resolve, and by the end of May we went.

I still do not know how to put down in words what that first visit was like. Not for lack of trying—I gave it a go with my journal as soon as I returned home. But none of my descriptions felt accurate. It’s not as if I hadn’t seen the way nature used to look. Plenty of media exists, from pictures and videos to early pitiful attempts at VR. These simulations were different. They enabled your mind and body to register how total it was. How all-encompassing and seemingly endless the different aspects of nature were. Grasses, buds, weeds, vines, creepers, rocks, soil, sand, and every variant in between. We both noticed tears pouring out of our eyes. Neither of us was crying. It was as if our body’s only solution to seeing how things used to be was to empty its sockets.

We didn’t have jobs, so with nothing else to do we were eventually hitting the simulations every other day. Brie kindly footed the bill.

“Actually,” she told me early in June, “you can thank my dad. He practically has limitless vouchers.”

“How’d he land that?”

“Donations. He works for Shell. They’re one of the biggest donors behind the preserves. Corporate guilt.”

“I figured free tix would go to clients.”

Brie shrugged. “Maybe. Except he’s never around. Never has been. Works too much. And he knows it. And he knows that I know he knows it. So I’ve played on that guilt ever since high school by getting anything I ask for.”

“Corporate and personal guilt, eh?”

“Some would say they’re the same,” she smirked.

Toward the end of June, we were exploring the Yosemite preserve. In it, we found a spring and ate a packed lunch there. It came to be a favorite spot of ours.

“I think I could live here,” said Brie. She said it with a sense of finality, as if my being there was not necessary. It was the kind of thing a person says after they have already thought over something significant on their own for quite some time. Brie had no intent of putting it out there to test the idea, see how it held up in the light of someone else’s scrutiny. She was stating a fact. A plan. All the same, I could not help myself.

“What, here here? Yosemite?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I just mean the simulations in general.”

In our estimations, we had seen perhaps ten percent of what all the different nature preserves had to offer. Recreations, they were officially called, the hyphen purposely gone. But we had both seen enough to be sold on the quality of the experience. Like the world building of the video games from our parents’ generation, there was no discernible end to the Recreations. We knew theoretically they could not go on forever, but neither could we find where the seamless loop of an outer wall was. We wondered, just as theoretically, if you could stay there for an indefinite amount of time, always finding something new. That last curiosity stayed at the level of conjecture, simply due to the parks closing at 11:00 each night. Cells powered down, holographic and extra-dimensional illusions stripped away, nothing but a vast exposed grid of lithium, ion, aluminum, steel—industry laid bare for the night shift. An off-switch had to be implemented in some way. When and how else would repairs take place? So we thought.

That’s the problem with the conceptual, though: It teases you to go farther. Find something concrete.

Brie got the idea mid-July to try and stow away at night, thanks to ride share’s serendipitous route. A few days prior, she had been returning home late from drinks with friends, and the driver of the car took the bypass that skirted the contours of the preserves. The whole place was lit up. Whether or not that meant the preserves were also running, Brie wasn’t sure. But she thought it was worth a shot.

“And if you get caught?”

“Easy. Play it off on how big the parks are. Say I got lost.”

We both agreed that seemed plausible enough. We had found it rather laughable how visitors were only given a ten-minute notice before closing time, a remarkable amount of faith the park developers had in the general public’s ability to reverse tracks back to a trailhead. Brie had a good sense of direction, though, and as the summer had gone on, her handle on the various parks had become impressive.

And then it was three in the morning, and she at my house, eyes tripping on what she’d found. My folks were gone, out of town for the weekend. I made us coffee downstairs in the kitchen, each of us on either side of the island to debrief. Island. Over the past two months it had not been lost on Brie or me how so many natural terms mainly referred to objects now. The Recreations had changed that a little bit, though. Thanks to the summer, when I heard island I now thought of the Bahamas first, not IKEA. So there’s that, I guess.

Brie gave a little smile. “They don’t shut off.”

I looked at the oven’s clock. “Well, at least not till 3:00.”

“You want me to pull an all-nighter?”

“Just saying. Only partially confirmed.”

“I’ll take the educated guess.”

I nodded. “There any changes?”

“What you’d expect—the stars shift, air got a good bit cooler, different wild life.”

“See anybody else? Maintenance?”

Brie shook her head. I threw in that this could be a one-off, but we both knew it probably wasn’t. She had stayed close to the preserve entrance for most of the experiment past closing time. Even if someone had done something as simple as pop their head in to do a lazy once-over on their night shift, she would have known.

We sipped our coffee for a while, avoiding the real question for a moment, but I was also tired, so I forced it.

“So what now?”

She tapped her nails on her mug. “See some more parks.”

“We’ve seen them all.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“You wanna come? Dig deeper?”

I hedged. Brie could be said to have convictions, while I do my fair share of floating through life. In a couple weeks, we would need to head back to our different schools. College was fine. Fairly pointless on the whole, but I still enjoyed it, enough to look forward to the fall starting up. If I had one consistent view of life, the Recreations confirmed it: Most things were shit, you made of it what you could, but nobody was doing themselves any favors pretending the world wasn’t past its prime already. So we were left with things like the parks to give us something to smile about. A little razzle dazzle, I suppose. That may be why I said what I did next.

“But it’s not real.”

She thought it over. Made a face. “Yes and no.”

“Oh, come on. What do you mean ‘and no’?”

“It was real at one time.”

“Which is to say that it’s not anymore.”

“So you think what’s out there is real?” Brie said, pointing emphatically in the direction of the front door, as if our yard contained the totality of the rainforests, timber, beaches, glaciers, and preserves that were gone long before we were ever born.

“Real enough.”

“Jesus.”

“I didn’t say I like it, Brie. But it’s what’s in front of us.”

“What I can’t figure out is what gets to count more as real. That absence, that thing we’ll never get back? Or these preserves that give us a pretty damn good glimpse of what we used to have?”

I thought about using the word escapism, but decided against it. Brie already knew I thought it, already had a pat answer for it. There were a hundred holes in her plan, and we both knew it. But, then again—convictions.

The simulation will end in one minute.

“You should probably get going,” Brie said. She was right. We weren’t too close to the entrance.

“How long do you think you can keep this up?”

“I like to think I’m pretty practiced at pretending things aren’t what they are. It’s kind of our birthright, yeah?”

I nodded and tried to think of something witty to say, but once I started feeling self- conscious about how long it was taking me, just dropping it stood as the better option.

On the trail back to the entrance, the sun had dipped to create long and languid shadows, as if anything that caught its light also possessed a double that was black, viscous, and melting. I felt the crunch of gravel and dirt beneath my hiking boots, and a thin spruce branch in my path glided across my arm. The first breeze of the future evening chill came through, and as I turned around to take in all of these replications, I could almost convince myself that it was good.