“This was your idea,” Bob reminded him.
“All right,” said Linus, “let’s not cast aspersions.”
Bob agreed, anyway, that they couldn’t remain outside in such weather as this for much longer; and when he proposed they retire to a café for a hot cup of coffee, Linus was enthusiastic. Jill, however, was shaking her head. “Coffee makes me go to the bathroom.”
“But going to the bathroom is fun,” said Linus.
Jill didn’t know what to say to that.
“How about a hot chocolate?” asked Bob, and Jill said that sounded pretty nice, after all. Bob said he knew a restaurant four or five blocks away; Jill said, “If we’ve got that far to go, I’m going to need a puff,” and she paused to tap a cigarette from her pack. Bob noticed she was smoking Camels. Bob had smoked Camels in his day, and he felt an impulse to ask for one. He didn’t, but then when Linus said, “Let’s smoke one of Jill’s cigarettes, Bob,” he surprised himself by instantly agreeing.
They stood together as Jill handed out Camels and passed her lighter around. They each lit up, inhaling, exhaling, enjoying the lark of the day in spite of the weather. “It feels just like skipping school, doesn’t it?” said Jill. She was in something like a good mood, the first Bob or Linus had witnessed, and they shared discreet looks between them in honor of the uncommon event. The snowfall seemed to decelerate as the nicotine seeped into their bodies. Linus said, “I haven’t had a smoke in ten years.” Bob said, “I haven’t had one since 1959.” Both men were transported back to the place of loving tobacco wholly; the terrible efficiency of the device was thrilling and frightening in equal measure.
As they made their progress toward the café, Jill became animated, speaking gaily of the many deaths in her family. Everyone was dead but her, she said. Her mother and father, of course; but they had not died in their dotage, but by grisly disease in the prime of their lives. They had died from what Jill called eating diseases.
“What do you mean, eating diseases?” Bob asked.
“I mean the disease ate them,” she said.
“You mean like leprosy?” asked Linus.
“It was in the leprosy family. I can’t remember the clinical name. Something exotic — a lot of syllables.”
Jill’s sisters were dead and her brothers were dead and her aunts and uncles were dead and her cousins were dead. Her husband was dead, but there was something in her tone which said that this was not so significant a tragedy as the others. Bob imagined Jill had been trapped in a decades-long marriage with an abusive, alcoholic tyrant; but when he asked if the union had been combative, Jill shook her head. “Goodness, no. Clarke didn’t have an angry drop of blood in him. But was he ever a damp one.”
“A what one?” said Linus.
“A wet-seat.”
“What?” said Bob.
“Unfun,” she said peevishly. “But it was intentional, the unfun-ness.”
“He was against it.”
“Strongly, yes. He found grace in solemnity.”
“That sounds admirable, actually.”
“Thank you, Bob. I did admire him. I just wish he’d taken me out for a hamburger dinner every once in a while.” She took a final drag off her Camel and flicked it into the street. “After Clarke passed, I thought, Now I’ll finally have some fun. But, I haven’t had any. Not really I haven’t.”
Bob said he was surprised to hear she had an interest in fun at all.
“Of course I’m interested. Can’t you see I crave it?”
“I can’t see that. Linus, can you see it?”
Linus said, “I can’t, no. But then, and possibly you’ve noticed this, I don’t really care about or consider anyone else’s point of view other than my own.”
They arrived at the café and were sheltered in a Naugahyde booth. Basking in the room’s warmth, they elected to indulge in full meals. Bob wanted breakfast; Jill and Linus both followed suit, and in a little while their food was delivered to the table. Jill picked up a piece of bacon from her plate, sniffed it, and held it out, asking, “Does this bacon smell funny to either of you?” Bob said he didn’t want to smell someone else’s bacon, but Linus said he did, and Jill held it under his nose. “It’s just a normal bacon smell,” he told Jill, and so she ate it.
They finished their meal but lingered; outside, the snow continued to fall. Bob saw a figure in pink move past the café and he hurried across the dining room to peer out the front door and see if it was Chip, and it wasn’t. When he returned to the table, Jill and Linus were discussing the moon landing. Linus said, “Neil Armstrong was playing at being off the cuff, but he had memorized the words before Apollo even left the ground. He always claimed to’ve improvised the line, but evidence suggests it was written by an ad agency hired via NASA.”
“Maybe he did make it up after all,” Jill said. “Maybe he did come up with it on the fly.”
“Please,” said Linus. “Have you ever looked in Neil Armstrong’s eyes? Talk about infinite space. You can see forever in that handsome head of his. The man couldn’t compose a shopping list. We want to think of astronauts as the embodiment of the best of our collective flesh and blood when actually they’re half-mannequin, and probably more than half.”
In a deep voice, Jill said, “‘One small step for man.’”
“It’s a man,” said Linus. “‘One small step for a man.’ Otherwise the quip doesn’t even make sense. Armstrong says that there was transmission interference and that he delivered the line with the ‘a’ intact.”
“You don’t believe it?” Bob asked.
“I’m doubtful.”
“I feel like you have a low opinion of astronauts generally.”
“I don’t like them very much, it’s true.”
“Well,” Jill said, “I don’t think Mr. Armstrong did such a bad job as all that.”
“You may take solace, my taciturn comrade, in the fact that yours is the majority opinion.”
Bob said, “I wonder what the second man on the moon’s words were.”
Linus said, “Buzz Aldrin: ‘Beautiful view. Magnificent desolation.’”
“What do you think of that?”
“The first part is chilling for its banality. The second part at least achieves some general shape of a human being, though it’s not a human being I’d want to, you know, go camping with.”
They made their way back to the center, following their own partly filled-in footsteps and wheelchair tracks. When they arrived they found Chip still was missing, and that Maria had broken down and called 911. A muscular police officer in his early twenties was interrogating her in her office. Bob and Jill and Linus lurked near her door; Maria was in trouble, and they wished to protect her in some way. The police officer eventually stood away from Maria’s desk, pausing in the open doorway as he flipped his notepad closed. “We’ll do what we can, obviously,” he said. “But it’s a shame we’re in this position in the first place, wouldn’t you agree?” Maria nodded contritely, but when the police officer turned away she held up a long middle finger at the back of his head, which stirred Linus in his chair, stirred him almost to the point of mistiness; later he would admiringly describe the gesture as a “Firm, firm bird.” After the police officer departed, Maria noticed that Bob and Jill and Linus had returned. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked Bob, leading him by the arm to stand apart from the others.
“We went out looking for Chip,” he told her.
“In this weather? At this time of night? You can’t just take out a resident without telling someone, Bob. Jill’s blood pressure is so low she’s practically flatlining. And there are so many things wrong with Linus I wouldn’t know where to begin naming them. Either one of them is teetering — they could drop dead at any given minute.”