it was more BNW than 1984. people went there voluntarily but of course they didn't realize what they were getting into. not that it was bad; they delivered on their promises and then some. they constantly worked to improve the facility; technology was developed there with a fervor that made the Manhattan project and the space program look like idle hobbies. the place was so vast and delightful on the inside that after a while you couldn't be sure if you even remembered the outside—or if you did, you might start seriously to wonder if you really cared. i was with a small group of capoeira buddies. i was the least skilled of us. there was a black guy with strong warm dry hands that i might have had a little crush on. there was a tall lanky bronze guy with kind of an afro whom i was less comfortable around, but whom i had an ever so slightly scared respect for. and there was the short knuckly white guy whose smart ass attitude kind of catalyzed and lubricated us all together in a way, kept everything from getting too serious or strange. and we weren't exactly prisoners. one time we reached a place where the wilderness ended and it was just blank stone corridors. we figured it was just an area they hadn't finished constructing yet. it had the feel of a museum display with nothing in it yet--the illusion was broken but it wasn't alarming, your mind just made allowances and you went on with the story. after all, it wasn't like we hadn't known the wilderness was fake. there was no deceit involved, right? at the end of that section was an opening onto a great concrete balcony. we could actually see the outside. what was weird about that was that we noticed ourselves reassuring ourselves--see, we can get outside when we want to. looking over the edge, leaning out over the low [wall], we talked about how high off the ground we were--yes, it was many stories up, but not impossibly high. you couldn't jump, but theoretically you could probably climb down using those decorative juts and contours, right? the fact that we were talking about that at all seemed to just press at the edge of genuine alarm, as we joked about never getting out alive. and then a few minutes later we forgot about it because the [balcony (it was really bigger than a balcony, more like a whole court that turned corners and had raised parts etc)] was such a great place to practice capoeira. lanky guy tried a move on black guy that didn't work. i got up my courage in the fresh air and said or you could have done this--Bucky said oooh he's gonna show us and I assured them I wasn't getting full of myself but I did have an idea. which hand did he have? I asked black guy and when I took it it was warm and felt good. he could have gone low like this, I said, doing a sweep, and I was pleased that black guy's eyebrows went up and he liked the move. later I jumped and noticed I stayed up extra long, and I said hey! they have a gravity dampener installed! and we all jumped really big for a while, laughing. that was the kind of stuff that made you forget.