When I taught Astronomy in New York City, in the evenings I rode my motorcycle home from campus, and sometimes I would stop to pick up dinner at a food truck called USA Halal, that stayed open late. Mehdi, the guy who ran it, had broad shoulders and a gaunt face that was always sweating in the heat of his tiny kitchen. He felt like a nice easy-going guy and admired my motorcycle, which always pleases me, and across our conversations I got to know him a bit. When he was a child he had immigrated to the US with his two brothers and a sister, and had been brought up with haphazard education by an uncle. He had married years ago but the wife had died in childbirth, and now he was raising his daughter alone.

One evening as I stopped at his truck, he asked me, ‘Hey professor, is this true?’, and handed me a square paper across the counter. It was a crayon drawing of the blue-green planet earth and the sun in very black space. A white tail was coming out of the back of the earth like a comet, suggesting the arc of the earth’s motion. There was a brown man standing on the earth next to a yellow box on wheels, and a big red arrow was pointing at the man.

I smiled at the drawing, ‘What is this?’

‘Yesterday my neighbour Armando and his little girl Carla stopped at my truck, you know she goes to school with my girl. Carla was drawing, so I said, can you make a drawing of me? I wasn’t very serious, you know, but she did make a drawing later at home. She is a sweet girl. They just came by and she gave me this. I was thinking she would just draw my face, or the food truck or something, but this is what she drew. And she said this is what she learned in school, about where we all are.’

‘Ah, that’s cute. Yeah, she’s right, that’s where we are’, I handed back the drawing.

Mehdi looked at the drawing and at me again. ‘Huh, really? We are all on this round rock just flying through this black stuff?’ he pointed at the black area in the drawing. Carla had really intensely rubbed her black crayon into that area, it was very dark and even a bit scary. ‘Is that where all of this is?’ he asked, gesturing at his surroundings outside the truck window.

I still couldn’t quite believe that this was all new information to him. But he was staring at me seriously, and his eyes placed the heavy weight of his question on my shoulders.

I stopped smiling and took a few moments to think about how to best answer. Then I said, ‘Yes Mehdi, all of us, this whole city, really every human being and all the animals and plants and mountains and seas, are on a round rock that is shooting through this black emptiness called space. But the rock is much much bigger than you and your food truck compared to how she drew it here, and there is no tail coming out of it like that.’

Mehdi’s eyebrows rose as he took in my words and stared at the drawing. Then he looked up at me, as if putting together so many things in his head, and asked, ‘So everyone knows about this already, and this is all okay and normal? What does it mean, and where did it come from and what’s going to happen?’

I took some time to absorb his emotions around the questions. Then I said, ‘Yes Mehdi, I think a lot of people know this, they learn it in school, but we don’t really even think about it every day. And if you ask me what it’s all about, honestly I think whatever you see happening around us is really just like a dream, but sometimes with more rules and patterns than a dream. And because of those patterns, some people, you know in your mosque or in my university, say they know what it all means and where it all comes from and where it goes. But you know, I don’t think anybody really knows.’

Mehdi grew quiet again and absent-minded for a few seconds. Then he snapped out of it and asked for my order, and I got a shrimp and rice with falafel. He quietly put it together and gave it to me, then we said our goodbyes and I got on my motorcycle and rode home through a thickening mist.