10/4 N’s new neighborhood, as we drove into the area in our U-Haul on Friday afternoon, appeared to us like a gigantic space station, a generation spaceship, and the only thing missing was the curvature of the landscape that would have indicated it was the inside of a large, rotating structure. It’s what you would build if you were in an infinite nothing and had to house humans in as natural an environment as possible.

As it turns out, it’s simply a business park. Huge office buildings nestled across the hills, surrounded by gigantic parking lots and carefully manicured lawn, with playfully curved roads between them. N’s neighborhood is simply one tile in this park, a business tile that has been swapped out for a residential tile. On it, there’s a single apartment complex, six floors high, with about a thousand units. Built into the hilly terrain with lots of irregular edges, it appears more like a longish castle. A hotel across from it. The Main Street is about a hundred yards long, flanked by two mirror-symmetrical buildings left and right, each of which has about ten standard-sized commercial units in it. Two restaurants, two bars, a sandwich place, a hairdresser and a dentist. That’s about it. N and J and I are joking about it all the time. It’s either the Truman Show, or The Shining, and most likely both. A perfect place for N to start living on his own again.