Free Mission to America by Walter Kirn Page A

manufactured anymore full of pillows and laundry and camping gear whose driver was eager to push the following three sentiments: “A Duck May Be Somebody's Mother,” “Back Off, Asshole,” and “Ask Me About the LifeZone Path to Health.” What made such people so promising, we felt, was that they were so obviously confused yet also, it struck us, striving not to be.
    I went at it in the Sweety-Freeze parking lot, spotting two nice but wrecked cars in the first minute. If Elder Stark wasn't finished when I got done, I'd drag him back to the van and turn us east. I'd been thinking the East was a better place for us. My impression from books I'd read was that people there had manners, traditions, guidelines, and good sense. In the West people made their lives up on the spot, with whatever materials were lying nearby and looked the most curious or colorful or easy to pick up. In some ways, that's what the first AFAs had done, and it didn't pain me to admit it, since I didn't feel these inclinations were necessarily harmful or inferior. I approved of them wholly, in fact. They'd made my soul. The problem was selling what these habits had wrought to people who shared them and knew full well what they led to, by and large. Piles of scratched-clean prizeless sweepstakes cards. Homesickness that gets worse when you get home. Endless soaring toy-rocket dreams and schemes that let out a sad, weak “pop” at their high climax point and then flake apart as they tumble toward some thorn patch that's also a hatching ground for baby snakes.
    My sense of the more prudent eastern people was that they'd wised up to these perils centuries back and buried them pretty deeply in their cemeteries under big tombstones inscribed with somber wisdom about how not to stumble in the future. My other sense was that over the years the easterners had gotten awfully cocky and shed a lot of their ancestral vigilance. We might just be able to go in there with wheelbarrows and take them out in bales and bushel loads.
    I was tracting a wee green Ford of the confused type when my pocket phone started buzzing inside my trousers. The sensation was just a few days old for me and still felt like a blast from the far future that I loved to research in the Bluff library, especially the domed cities beneath the oceans and growing our heads back if they got cut off. According to the more daring authors, in fact, we humans (people were “humans” in those books, which made us sound, to me, after a while, like something sleeker and kinder than we are) might have two other choices for saving our heads, or at least their inner contents. Carefully scoop out the brain and set it floating in a special brain aquarium or drain all the memories and moods into a computer with your old name on it. Both ideas sounded lonely, but maybe not if the tanks and computers were pushed up close together.
    The future could take many paths, the books insisted, and might even vanish before it came if we badly imbalanced or despoiled Earth. Earth, the habitat of Humans. The words felt slightly greasy in my ears.
    The buzzing stopped when I didn't answer the phone. The sound still jolted my dreamy thought side before it affected my hands and fingers. Lauer knew I had this problem. As quickly as phone electronics would allow, it seemed, the future buzzed again.
    Lauer announced himself by saying, “Lauer.”
    â€œGreetings, Lauer. Person Two. The Child.” This was how Mason Plato LaVerle would sound after he became a Human on Earth.
    â€œPerverse phenomenon, just then. Not what the mind would rationally expect. Even though you were ready for my call then, there was a considerable lag. Was the unit right there in your hand?”
    â€œI'm full of hot fudge and ice lard and I'm sluggish.”
    â€œInsulin overload from simple sugars.”
    Lauer was my model as a Human on Earth.
    He asked me for our “location” in Wyoming and then