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fake molded plastic-prop flat-screen monitors used by home stagers, realtors, and furniture stores. That’s it. There aren’t even pencils in the room. I don’t believe anyone’s ever been in this room, let alone controlled factory operations from it only minutes ago.
    Next comes the Showcase of Products Room, which begged the question I kept finding myself asking of NoKo: If you’re going to go to all the effort to put your “best foot forward,” why not try a little harder to make it look better? Which is not to say the white-lacquer bookshelf-cabinet all-in-ones lined up next to each other along the wall and the bevy of beverages in clashing packaging didn’t look pleasing; it just could’ve looked better.
    Unexpectedly we come upon two workers who have, for some reason, stayed behind to finish making the biscuits after their 4,998 coworkers so quickly departed. The local guide or factory manager (I can’t remember who) declares these workers “heroes.”
    We watch them—their heads down, doing nothing—for a few minutes, and then my group moves on. As usual, I stay behind watching, wondering what it all means. And as usual, Fresh Handler, always patient during my extended reveries—stays with me. Eventually one of the workers looks up and stares right back at me, and then she gives me the stink eye—my second stink eye in as many days. But it’s also one of the few genuine things I’ve encountered. So I snap her photo, adding it to my “Shit I Think Might Be Real” list. And to Fresh Handler’s great pleasure, we move along.

Come, we shall have some fun now! thought Alice.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 7
THE SIMULATION CINEMA
    T here was a change to our schedule, so we had an hour to kill before lunch and our afternoon drive to Kaesong.
    “Waterpark?” Older Handler suggested.
    “I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said. Never in a million years had it crossed my mind to bring one with me to North Korea.
    “You rent one,” Older Handler shrugged.
    Ewwww. “No!” I shot back, perhaps too quickly. But the thought of sharing a rental bathing suit in a country that lacked running water held little appeal.
    I abruptly changed tack, attempting to maintain our precarious détente, “That sounds fun, but I don’t know how to swim,” I lied.
    “3-D movie?”
    That sounded easy. All I’d have to do was sit and keep my clothes on.
    “Great!” I replied enthusiastically.
    A short ride later we pulled into the empty parking lot of the Runga Funfair, “A Wonderland for the People!” next to the Taedong River.
    It was closed, I guess for the day, but it looked more like it had been abandoned forever. I could practically see the tumbleweeds rolling by. As I stood taking photos of nothing, my handlers entered into intense negotiations—DISCUSSIONS—with the employees sitting inside the glass booth at the entrance. Eventually Older Handler tells me to pay a euro, and we’re allowed in.
    As we walk through the deserted amusement park toward the Simulation Cinema, Older Handler keeps insisting the Funfair is normally open seven days a week and is always very busy.
    I don’t know what to say.
    “Then why is it closed now?” I ask.
OLDER HANDLER: They didn’t know we were coming.
ME: What did you just say?
OLDER HANDLER: The people, they come later.
ME: What time does it open?
OLDER HANDLER: Yes.
    Good chat.
    When we arrive at the theater we are, as is often inexplicably and arbitrarily the case in NoKo, required to cover our shoes with oversize, opaque, blue, protective caplike things like the ones doctors in operating rooms are required to wear on their heads to cover their hair. The trouble is, in NoKo these things are themselves dirty, having never been washed, and you put them on over your shoes while still standing outside, then walk from the outside in, thereby eliminating all chance of keeping the outside out.
    And there I am—standing in the lobby of an empty