On the way to the fair, subway doors opened and closed automatically. A family entering a car could be sliced in two, parents and older sister in the accelerating train looking back at the orphaned five-year-old on the platform.
The fair was bright and hot. His mother called it “sweltering,” which made him think uneasily of swimming in sweat. There was a big metal Earth called the Unisphere. It had three rings that his dad said represented satellites named Echo, Telstar 1, and Telstar 2. His dad said the theme of the fair was “Peace Through Understanding,” and both of his parents laughed. Mark sat with his mother in a boat that floated through the Disney pavilion, while puppets twirled, clacked, and sang “It’s a Small, Small World.” When they sang, their faces split in half. Mark liked the igloos.
Everyone was eating Belgian Waffles. They were big fluffy seat cushions with pits to hold all the strawberries in syrup and whipped cream Mark wanted. He flapped his arms. His father told him to pipe down.
In the sweltering heat, on a stretch of bright sidewalk, he vomited up a Belgian Waffle.
The Ferris wheel was a like a big automobile tire. Susan rocked the gondola, but Mark was scared and Dad told her to stop. There was a time capsule that would be opened in five thousand years. There were long lines in the glare. He held his mother’s hand while Susan fidgeted in and out of the line and he worried that a man in uniform would appear and announce that she had lost her place, and they would all have to go to the end of the line and it would be her fault but she would never admit it.
Mark loved the ramps, which rose in curvy sweeps and sweepy curves, like flight paths of Whisperjets taking off. There were escalators, monorails, elevators, cable cars, floating seats, rising stands. “Man conquers gravity!” Susan read from a sign. “Pretty corny.” Mark fought with her over who could be first to pretend to drive the luxury convertible on the Magic Skyway. He cried and got his way because he was younger. Susan was ten and should know better. The car floated up a ramp and went through the time barrier. Animatronic Triceratops babies broke out of shells; a Brontosaurus in a swamp lifted its head, chewing weeds. Then came the dawn of man. Cavemen invented the wheel and fought a mammoth. To Mark’s disbelieving delight, one father caveman was rubbing his butt in front of a campfire.
Even better was Futurama. Mark climbed on the conveyor belt and drank in the dioramas, while the chair he sat in whispered in his ear about the wonders to come. Transports on balloon wheels served lunar mining colonies. Submarine trains carried riches from the ocean floor. The best came at the end: the City of Tomorrow! Streamlined cars moved soundlessly down automated highways. Elevated disks of parkland and arcades led to clean skyscrapers that glowed with yellow squares of rooms and offices.
Mark’s whole being ached.
• • •
In first grade, he felt serious and adult. The desks were arranged in a grid. The teacher, Miss Peabody, showed the class how to write the full heading that went on top of your schoolwork, if you already knew how to write, which Mark did: Mark Fuller, 1st Grade, Miss Peabody, September 8, 1965.
Writing the year on an official document made him think about it for the first time. He had been born in 1959. He’d just turned six. By the end of this grade, he would be writing “1966” on the heading. 1959 and 1965 would never come back. When he got to Susan’s age, it would be 1970.
How strange.
Then it occurred to him that he would probably still be alive, and not even very old, in the year 2000. Which meant that, one day, he would live in the City of Tomorrow. Happiness flooded him. It was a long way off, but he was content to wait. Waiting, in and of itself, had always made him happy.
• • •
There was a new show on TV that Mom thought he might like called Lost in Space. It started at 7:30 and was over by 8:00, so he would have time to get ready for bed afterward and have his light out by his bedtime at 8:30. At eight, Mom called downstairs, where he was kneeling on the living room floor with his elbows on the hassock, his face near the screen. Since the show was over, he should come up and brush his teeth.
But the show wasn’t over. There had been a mistake in the TV Guide. The show was an hour long. And at some point during the previous half hour, Mark had had a revelation: Lost in Space was the most important thing in the world.
Mark had always obeyed his bedtime, but he howled upstairs to his mother: he couldn’t!
Maybe she heard the true note of anguish in his voice. For the first—and it would prove to be the last—time of his childhood, she relaxed the bedtime rule. He rushed upstairs at 8:30, ready to perform speedy, grateful miracles, and his light was out by 8:40. For the rest of Lost in Space’s three-year run, he watched it (elbows on the living room hassock, face inches from the screen) in his pajamas with his teeth brushed.
• • •
For Christmas that year, he got The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles. He loved the biggest ones, the sauropods—Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus and Brontosaurus—the ones that stood in swamps and chewed weeds. He loved their long necks and tails and their plump strong legs and circular flat-bottomed feet that looked like the hassock. He loved their smooth gray skin. His favorite was Brontosaurus, Thunder Lizard. “Like the two other giants, she is a peace-loving plant-eater,” the Golden Book said. The drawing showed her being attacked by Allosaurus. “He likes meat—great
