Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (39 page)

EARTH (A GIFT SHOP)

Charles Yu

C
ome to Earth! Yes, that Earth. A lot of people think we’re closed during construction, but we are not! We’re still open for business.

Admittedly, it’s a little confusing.

First, we were Earth: The Planet. Then life formed, and that was a great and good time.

And then, for a little while, we were Earth: A Bunch of Civilizations!

Until the fossil fuels ran out and all of the nation-states collapsed and a lucky few escaped Earth and went out in search of new worlds to colonize.

Then, for what seemed like forever, we were Earth: Not Much Going On Here Anymore
.

And that lasted for a long time. Followed by another pretty long time. Which was then followed by a really long time.

Then, after a while, humans, having semi-successfully established colonies on other planets, started to come back to Earth on vacation. Parents brought their kids, teachers brought their classes on field trips, retirees came in groups of twenty or thirty. They wanted to see where their ancestors had come from. But there was nothing here. Kids and parents and teachers left, disappointed.
That’s it?
they would say, or some would even say,
It was okay I guess, but I thought there would be more
.

So, being an enterprising species and all, some of us got together and reinvented ourselves as Earth: The Museum, which we thought was a great idea.

We pooled our resources and assembled what we could find. To be sure, there was not a whole lot of good stuff left after the collapse of Earth: A Bunch of Civilizations! One of us had a recording of Maria Callas singing the Violetta aria in
La Traviata
. We all thought it sounded very pretty, so we had that playing in a room in the museum. And I think maybe we had a television playing episodes of
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
. The main attraction of the museum was the painting we had by some guy of some flowers. No one could remember the name of the guy or the painting, or even the flowers, but we were all pretty sure it was an important painting at some point in the history of paintings and also the history of people, so we put that in the biggest room in the center of everything.

But parents and teachers, being humans (and especially being descendants of the same humans who messed everything up in the first place) thought the whole museum was quite boring, or even
very
boring, and they would say as much, even while we were still within earshot, and we could hear them saying that to each other, about how bored they were. That hurt to hear, but more than that what was hurtful was that no one was coming to Earth anymore, now that it was a small and somewhat eclectic museum. And who could blame them? After the collapse of civilization, school just has never been the same. By the time kids are done with their five years of mandatory schooling, they are eight or even nine years old and more than ready to join the leisure force as full-time professional consumers. Humans who went elsewhere have carried on that tradition from their days on Earth. They are ready to have their credit accounts opened, for their spending to be tracked, to get started in their lifelong loyalty rewards programs. Especially those humans who are rich enough to be tourists coming back here to Earth.

Eventually one of us realized that the most popular part of the museum was the escalator ride. Although you would think interstellar travel would have sort of raised the bar on what was needed to impress people, there was just something about moving diagonally that seemed to amuse the tourists, both kids and adults, and then one of us finally woke up and said, well, why not give them what they want?

So we did some research, in the few books we had left, and on the computer, and the research confirmed our hypothesis: Humans love rides.

So Earth: The Museum was shuttered for several years while we reinvented ourselves and developed merchandise and attractions, all of the things we were naturally good at, and after another good long while, we finally were able to reopen as Earth: The Theme Park and Gift Shop, which did okay but it was not too long before we realized the theme park part of it was expensive to operate and kind of a hassle, really, as our engineering was not so good and we kept making people sick or, in a few cases, really misjudging g-forces, and word got out among the travel agencies that Earth: The Theme Park and Gift Shop was not so fun and actually quite dangerous, so we really had no choice but to drop the theme park part and that is how we became Earth: The Gift Shop.

Which was all anyone ever wanted anyway. To get a souvenir to take home.

We do have some great souvenirs.

Our top-selling items for the month of October:

1.
History: The Poster!
A 36" x 24" color poster showing all of the major phases of human history. From the Age Before Tools, through the short-lived but exciting Age of Tools, to the (yawn) Age of Learning, and into our current age, the Age After the Age of Learning.

2.
War: The Soundtrack.
A three-minute musical interpretation of the experience of war, with solos for guitar and drums. Comes in an instrumental version (for karaoke lovers).

3.
Art: The Poster!
Beautiful painting of a nature scene. Very realistic-looking, almost like a photograph. Twenty percent off if purchased with History: The Poster!

4.
God, the Oneness: A Mystical 3-D Journey.
22-minute DVD. Never-before-seen footage. Comes with special glasses for viewing.

5.
Science: The Video Game.
All the science you ever need to bother with! Almost nothing to learn. So easy you really don’t have to pay attention. For ages three to ninety-three.

6.
Summer in a Bottle.
Sure, no one can go outside on Earth anymore because it’s 170 degrees Fahrenheit, but who needs outside when they have laboratory-synthesized Summer in a Bottle? Now comes in two odors: “Mist of Nostalgia” or “Lemony Fresh.”

7.
Happiness: A Skin Lotion.
At last you can be content and moisturized, at the same time. From the makers of Adventure: A Body Spray.

Other strong sellers for the month include Psychologically Comforting Teddy Bear and Shakespeare: The Fortune Cookie. All of the items above also come in ring tones, T-shirts, cups, and key chains.

And coming for the holidays, get ready for the latest installment of Earth’s greatest artistic work of the last century:
Hero Story
:
A Hero’s Redemption (and Sweet Revenge)
, a computer-generated script based on all the key points of the archetypal story arc that we humans are.

Which brings us back to our original point. What was our original point? Oh yeah, Earth: The Gift Shop is still here. Not just here, but doing great! Okay, maybe not great, but okay, we’re okay. We would be better if you came by and shopped here. Which is why we sent you this audio catalog, which we hope you are reading (otherwise we are talking to ourselves). Earth: The Gift Shop: The Brochure. Some people have said the name, Earth: The Gift Shop, is a bit confusing because it makes it seem like this is the official gift shop of some other attraction here on Earth, when really the attraction is the gift shop itself. So we are considering changing our name to Earth (A Gift Shop), which sounds less official but is probably more accurate. Although if we are going down that road, it should be pointed out that the most accurate name would be Earth = A Gift Shop, or even Earth = Merchandise, since basically, if we are being honest with ourselves, we are a theme park without the park part, which is to say we are basically just a theme, whatever that means, although Earth, an Empty Theme Park would be an even worse name than Earth = A Gift Shop, so for now we’re just going to stick with what we’ve got, until something better comes along.

So, again, we say: Come to Earth! We get millions of visitors a year, from near and far. Some of you come by accident. No shame in that! We don’t care if you are just stopping to refuel, or if you lost your way, or even if you just want to rest for a moment and eat a sandwich and drink a cold bottle of beer. We still have beer! Of course, we prefer if you come here intentionally. Many of you do. Many of you read about this place in a guidebook, and some of you even go out of your way and take a detour from your travels to swing by the gift shop. Maybe you are coming because you just want to look, or to say you were here. Maybe you are coming to have a story to tell when you get back. Maybe you just want to be able to say: I went home. Even if it isn’t home, was never your home, is not anyone’s home anymore, maybe you just want to say, I touched the ground there, breathed the air, looked at the moon the way people must have done nine or ten or a hundred thousand years ago. So you can say to your friends, if only for a moment or two: I was a human on Earth. Even if all I did was shop there.

About “Earth (A Gift Shop)”

The Ray Bradbury story that inspired me was “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which is about a fully automated house that is still running all of its domestic routines after its human inhabitants have all perished. I was drawn to the idea of telling a story about people through their technology. We can imagine the morning rush of the family who lived in this house: up out of bed, into the shower, down the stairs for toast and oatmeal, coffee for the parents, out the door to face the day at school and work. Our technology will outlive us (unless, of course, we all become cyborgs, in which case I suppose we will become our technology), and future archaeologists will write research papers on their discoveries of the cultural artifacts we are leaving behind.

In my story, I wanted to imagine what it would be like to look at our artifacts now, as outsiders, in a kind of real-time archaeology, or self-anthropology. The artifacts I invent are a bit exaggerated, but not much. Shopping at a mall or theme park these days, I am amazed at how skilled we are at “productizing” things, and I imagine what these packaged cultural products will look like to people a few hundred years from now. In trying to come up with somewhat silly ideas for products, it struck me (not for the first time) how prescient Mr. Bradbury was, how amazing it is that he came up with the “parlor walls” of
Fahrenheit 451
almost sixty years ago(!), and now we can go to the local big-box retailer and buy a high-definition 52-inch flat-screen parlor wall for five or six hundred dollars.

—Charles Yu

HAYLEIGH’S DAD

Julia Keller

H
ayleigh and Sharon were forbidden to play in the basement. Hayleigh’s dad, Ed Westin, had been uncharacteristically severe on that point. “Never, never,
never,
” he said, inserting a sudden dark barb of seriousness into his otherwise mild voice, to indicate that he meant business, “play in the basement, girls. Got it?” He could be a teaser, a clown; he was definitely one of those “fun dads” whom Sharon deeply, silently admired—her own father, Larry Leinart, being a sour, dreary, disapproving man who seemed to nurse a secret grudge throughout his day, touching it constantly with his thoughts the way you bump a sore finger against everything you reach for—but on the subject of the basement, Hayleigh’s dad was not fun at all. He was firm. Borderline scary.

“Are we totally clear on that, kids?”

They nodded. Not in unison: Hayleigh nodded first, because this was, after all, her house and her dad, and then Sharon joined in.

“So we’re clear,” Ed Westin reconfirmed. His face was blank. No smile crossed it, which was unusual; he had a permanent wrinkle on each side of his mouth, just from smiling so much. At this moment Hayleigh’s dad reminded Sharon of her own father—hard and mean—although Sharon could tell that Mr. Westin’s mood was prompted by concern for their safety, so she forgave him. And anyway, most of the time Hayleigh’s dad was
nothing
like her dad, in all kinds of ways. Ed Westin was short and kind of pudgy. The girls had discussed this clinically, neutrally, not cruelly. Larry Leinart was tall and slender, with a narrow waist and wide shoulders. His dark suits fit him perfectly, like animal skin.

In a way, Sharon had often thought, it was the reverse of how things ought to be. Ed Westin was the one you’d think would be sleek and solid, because he worked outside with his hands. He was an electrician for Cozad Brothers Construction. Larry Leinart sat behind a desk all day; he was a lawyer with a big law firm downtown. However, as Sharon had been quick to point out to Hayleigh, her father didn’t handle interesting cases involving murders or kidnappings. Instead he focused on things such as corporate mergers and property transfers. No wonder he was so glum all the time. His work was boring and he had to dress up for it. Suit, tie, stiff white shirt, loafers. Whereas Hayleigh’s dad got to wear jeans and a flannel shirt and boots and a baseball cap.

Sharon and Hayleigh had both turned eight years old that fall. They had not been best friends very long. Friendship was a serious thing, with clear, grimly implacable rules. Everybody had one and
only one
best friend, and that person had to be chosen as your companion
every single time
, on the playground at recess, or eating lunch in the cafeteria, or whatever.

Sharon had always wanted to be friends with Hayleigh Westin, but until recently, it just hadn’t been possible. Hayleigh’s original best friend was a thin, quiet girl named Samantha Bollinger, and Sharon’s original best friend was actually a boy: Greg Pugh. Normally the gender rule for best friends was absolute—girls with girls, boys with boys—but Greg’s family had lived next door to Sharon’s family since before either Sharon or Greg was born, and he and Sharon had been playing together since they were toddlers, so they got a pass. They were best friends through the first and second grades and the first part of the third.

Then Samantha Bollinger’s parents split up and she and her mother left town. It was very sudden, and to Sharon’s delight, it left Hayleigh without a best friend. Sharon was happy to fill the void. Greg Pugh was on his own now.

A few times that fall, when Hayleigh and Sharon were bored, they would ride their bikes slowly past Samantha’s old house—it was two streets over from Hayleigh’s house—and let their eyes slide over in that direction. Samantha’s dad still lived there, all by himself. If he happened to be getting into his car at the time and spotted them, he would glare. Once, he started to raise his fist, as if he wanted to shout something, but then seemed to get hold of himself. He lowered his fist. He was a mean dad, Sharon instantly realized, not a fun dad.

Samantha’s house didn’t look the same anymore. No bike lay on its side on the front lawn, its tires still spinning because it had been flung away moments ago by Samantha when she raced inside for a juice box. The curtains in the window of what had been Samantha’s bedroom weren’t pink anymore. Her dad must’ve changed the curtains. The house seemed to breathe sour air in and out too slowly, like an old person with respiratory problems.

Samantha had been a runner, the best runner in school, with long legs that moved with such natural grace that she didn’t even seem to be trying; it looked as if running was a normal state for her, like walking is for other people. Yet once Samantha was gone, she was gone, almost as if she’d been running somewhere at dusk one evening and had just kept right on going, her long, thin body merging with the purplish pink twilight, folding herself into it, like somebody leaving the stage of the school auditorium and slipping between the heavy pleats of the curtain, and after a slight stir in the fabric—
poof
, that’s it. Gone.

Sharon was not a good runner. She was chunky. Borderline fat. Increasingly, that had begun to irritate her father—he had started commenting on her food intake, turning the family dinner table into a very tense place—but Sharon’s size didn’t seem to bother Hayleigh at all. Sharon, in fact, was the opposite of Samantha Bollinger in lots of ways. Samantha was quiet, and Sharon was talkative. Samantha had been a “poor-to-average” student—that was a phrase Sharon had overheard when two teachers were chatting about Samantha one day, and she loved its suggestion of shabbiness, of hopeless mediocrity—while Sharon excelled in her classes. Sharon was “bright,” a word that several of her teachers had used when referring to her. She liked English and math and science. She was fascinated by rockets and space travel. Also atomic energy.

Maybe, Sharon thought, Hayleigh appreciated the contrast. Maybe she’d been secretly tired of Samantha Bollinger and her perfect stride and the way she’d sit in class, the knees of her long legs bumping up against the bottom of the desk, her face glazed with incomprehension, not even bothering to
pretend
she understood what the teacher was saying. Sharon always pretended, even if she was lost. She wasn’t lost often, but when it happened, she still leaned forward, still looked bright and earnest and eager. Her theory was that if you looked like you got it, sooner or later, you’d get it.

When Sharon told Hayleigh’s dad about that theory, Ed Westin had laughed and said, “Fake it till you make it, sweetie, fake it till you make it!” He seemed proud of her, as if for the moment she was actually his daughter, his flesh and blood, which gave Sharon a funny little flutter in her stomach. It wasn’t a bad feeling at all. She worried at first about the disloyalty to her own family, but then she just let go and enjoyed the feeling. It was like riding your bike barefoot on a summer day: You knew you weren’t supposed to do it, because it was dangerous—if you caught a toe in the spokes, there’d be a bloody mess—but it felt so good and so free that you did it anyway.

H
ayleigh’s dad had to leave. He was supposed to stay there Saturday morning while Sharon and Hayleigh played—that was the deal, that was the arrangement, that was what Sharon had told her mom before she left her house—
Hayleigh’s dad is gonna be there the whole time, geez, it’s fine
—but now he had to go.

Sharon could tell he didn’t want to, but he had no choice.

He had called his boss to check on a job. That’s when he got the bad news. It was about the wiring. Somebody else had done something wrong, another electrician had “screwed up royally,” according to what Hayleigh’s dad was saying into his cell phone. His voice was crisp and businesslike, even though he had just described himself to his boss as “really,
really
pissed off.” Hayleigh and Sharon listened avidly to his end of the call.

“Okay,” Hayleigh’s dad was saying. He was pacing, holding the cell with one hand, scratching the back of his head with the other. “Okay. Okay, Roy. Yeah. I think I can get it done. But you tell everybody else to back off, okay? Don’t mess with it. I’m on my way.”

He flipped his cell shut and looked down at Hayleigh and Sharon. They were stretched out on the floor of the living room. They were just hanging out, which was typical for a Saturday.

Hayleigh had assured Sharon—so that Sharon in turn could assure her mom—that her dad would stick around, would keep an eye on them. It was silly, really; they were plenty old enough to stay by themselves. And sometimes, for short periods of time, they were allowed to. When Hayleigh came over to her house, for instance, Sharon’s mom would sometimes leave for a little while to pick up stuff at the dry cleaners, and that was okay. Sharon wasn’t sure the Westins ever left stuff at the dry cleaners, the way the Leinarts did every single week, because, Sharon knew, her dad’s shirts and suits had to be dry-cleaned perfectly and he could be “a real prick about it,” which was the phrase Sharon had heard her mom use once, when she didn’t know Sharon was listening.

“It’s just for a little while,” Hayleigh’s dad was saying to them. “An hour, maybe. Hour and a half, tops. We’ve got this big project out by the mall—you’ve seen it, right? The office park? Well, some friggin’ idiot put the breakers in wrong, and the whole thing’s arcing and sparking.”

Sharon was impressed. Her father would never have said “friggin” in front of her. Nor would he expose the sort of passion that Ed Westin was showing. Ed Westin cared about his job, about things being done the right way. Sharon could tell. He had once worked for NASA, Hayleigh had told Sharon, and she said it casually, but they both knew how cool that was. He’d been in the U.S. Navy at the time, and he and his crew had been called in to do some electrical work on one of the space shuttles. He didn’t talk about it, but when Sharon looked at his hands, she could imagine it: Hayleigh’s dad, twisting wires, checking connections, then nodding at somebody and giving the thumbs-up sign. He made sure everything would work perfectly in outer space.

“So it won’t take me very long,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know it. Way before lunchtime. I promise.”

He was looming over them, frowning, like he wasn’t quite sure. Hayleigh and Sharon were lying on their stomachs on the living room carpet, their chins propped up on their palms. They’d been watching TV—it was a rerun of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, which Sharon was not allowed to watch at home, a fact that added a special bit of deliciousness to the show—when Hayleigh’s dad came into the room, talking on his cell. Hayleigh had politely turned down the volume on the set during her father’s call.

“You girls’ll be okay, right?” he said. He looked dubious. Sharon could see how torn he was, torn between two kinds of duty.

“Sure, Dad,” Hayleigh said. She didn’t elaborate, didn’t ridicule his concerns. Sharon took note: Hayleigh didn’t overplay her hand. Too much reassurance was always a red flag for a parent. Hayleigh, Sharon had to concede, was pretty smart. Not book-smart—that was Sharon’s specialty—but smart when it came to dealing with parents.

“Okay,” he said.

Then came the warning. “But no playing in the basement, you two,” Hayleigh’s dad added. “Absolutely, positively not. Okay?”

Bored nods from both of them. Hayleigh didn’t even take her eyes from the TV screen, which Sharon thought was another nice touch. On the screen, Buffy had just karate-kicked a bad vampire.

“Never, never,
never
play in the basement. Got it?” Hayleigh’s dad went on. “Are we clear on that, girls?”

Sharon nodded again, but Hayleigh—unexpectedly clever Hayleigh!—looked up at her father as if she’d forgotten he was even there, so absorbed was she in the plot of the
Buffy
episode. They were so wrapped up in the drama that, chances were, Hayleigh’s dad would leave and return without either girl having moved an inch from her spot right here on the living room floor. Frankly, Hayleigh’s expression implied, there was zero chance that they would even
think
about the basement, much less venture down there. They were far too preoccupied to remember that the basement even
existed
.

The girls continued to stare at the TV screen while Hayleigh’s dad foraged for his truck keys and his dark blue windbreaker and his red baseball cap with
COZAD BROS
woven in cursive white letters across the crown. As he pulled open the front door, still looking a bit worried, he said, “See you later, girls. If you need me, I’ve got my cell,” and they grunted back at him, which, here in Hayleigh’s house, constituted an acceptable reply but in her own house, Sharon knew, would not have been tolerated. And then he was gone.

At first they didn’t move. They watched the TV screen, their chins still perched in their palms. Then each girl’s eyes slid over to meet her friend’s eyes. They heard the truck starting up in the driveway, the dull, dusty roar. The roar slacked off as Hayleigh’s dad backed his truck out of the driveway.

The noise diminished again and then disappeared completely.

They were alone. Unsupervised.

They didn’t say a word, but each girl knew exactly what the other one was going to do, as surely as if it had been planned, plotted, carefully choreographed days ago.

It was a race to see which girl could scramble to her feet faster—although it really wasn’t much of a race at all, because Sharon was slow and clumsy on account of her weight, so Hayleigh won easily—and then to see who could be the first to make it to the kitchen in order to lunge for the black knob on the white basement door.