They walked to the bar.
Teddy was returning chairs.
Once the dozen clustered at the Captain’s booth dispersed, the place looked empty.
“I thought Lanya was here, maybe.”
Tak’s hands locked. “I haven’t seen her. Madame B. might know where she is.” And unlocked. “Hey, I saw the big advertisement in the Times, all over page three. Congratulations.” Tak frowned. “By the way, what did you do at the coming of the great white light? Orange, I guess it was, really. You got any opinions to pass the time with while we wait to see if there’s going to be a tomorrow?”
Kid leaned on meshed fingers. “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything much. I had some people with me. I think they were more upset than I was. You know, Tak, for a while I thought…” The bartender set down a beer bottle. “…no, that’s silly.” Kid pulled the bottle to him, leaving a sweat ribbon. “Isn’t it?” The candles glittered in it.
“What?”
“I was going to say, for a while I thought it was a dream.”
“If I woke up right now, I’d feel a lot better.”
“No. Not that.” Kid lifted his bottle once, twice, a third, a fourth, a fifth time from lapping rings. “When it was rising, I remember I went out to take a look from the back porch; and thinking maybe I was dreaming. Suddenly I woke up. In bed. Only, when I got up, later, it was still there. Finally, after it went down, I went to sleep again. You know, right now—” he smiled, to himself till it overcame the strictures of his facial muscles and burst stupidly onto his face—“I still don’t know what I dreamed and what I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t really see anymore than the Captain.”
“You went to sleep?”
“I was tired.” Saying that annoyed Kid. “What about you?”
“Christ, I—” The bartender brought Tak’s bottle. “What did I do?” Tak snorted. “I saw the light coming through those bamboo blinds I have, and went out on the roof to take a look. I watched it rising for about three minutes. Then I freaked.”
“What’d you do?”
“I went down into the stairwell and sat in the dark for about an hour or so…I guess. I’d got this whole paranoid thing about radiation—no, don’t laugh. We might all start losing our hair in the next six hours while our capillaries fall apart. Finally I got scared of just sitting in the dark and went up to look again…” He stopped moving his bottle around the wet circle. “I’m just glad I don’t have a heart condition. It stretched over so much of the horizon I couldn’t look at one edge and see the other. I couldn’t look at where the bottom was cut off by the roofs and see the top.” Tak’s bottle rumbled about. “I went back down into the stairwell, closed the door, and just cried. For a couple of hours. I couldn’t stop. While I was crying, I thought about lots of things. One of them, by the way, was you.”
“What?”
“I remember sitting there and asking myself if this was what the inside of insanity felt like—Ah, there: you’ve taken offense.”
He hadn’t. But now wondered if he should.
“Well, I’m sorry. That’s what I thought, anyway.”
“You were really that scared?”
“You weren’t?”
“I guess a lot of people around me were. I thought about all the terrible things it could have been—like everybody else. But if it was any of them, there wasn’t anything I could do.”
“You really are almost as weird as people keep trying to make us think you are. Look, when you come up short against the edge like that, when you discover the earth really is round, when you find out you’ve killed your father and married your mother after all, or when you look at the horizon and see something, like that, rising—man, you have to have some sort of human reaction: laugh, cry, sing, something! You can’t just lie down and take a nap.”
Kid lingered in the ruins of his confusion. “I…did a lot of laughing.”
Tak snorted again. “Okay, so you’re not that flippy I’d just hate to think you were as brave as everybody keeps going on you are.”
“Me?” This couldn’t, Kid thought, be what the inside of courage felt like.
“Excuse me,” the southwestern voice said from Kid’s other side. “You were pointed out to me as…the Kid?”
Kid turned, with his confusion. “Yeah…?”
Kamp looked at it, and laughed. Kid decided he liked him. Kamp said, “I’m supposed to deliver a message to you, from Roger.”
“Huh?”
“He told me if I came here I would probably meet you. He’d like—if it’s all right with you—if you’d come up to the house three Sundays from now. He says that he’ll be squeezing more time together, so it will be in slightly less than two weeks—now I don’t know how you guys put up with that—” He laughed again. “Roger wants to have a party for you. For your book.” The Captain paused with a consideration nod. “Saw it. Looks good. Good luck on it, now.”
Kid wondered what to say. He tried: “Thank you.”
“Roger said to come in the evening. And bring twenty or thirty friends, if you want. He says it’s your party. It starts at sunset; in three Sundays.”
“Presumptuous bastard,” Tak said. “Sunset? He might at least wait and see if there’s a tomorrow morning.” With his forefinger he hooked down his cap visor and walked off.
Kid was pondering statements to place into the silence, when Kamp apparently decided he’d try: “I’m afraid I don’t know much about poetry.”
Liked him, Kid felt. But for the life of him he didn’t know why.
“I read some of it at Roger’s, though. But if I started asking questions about it, now, I’d probably just end up looking worse than I already do.”
“Mmmm.” Kid nodded and pondered. “You get tired of people asking you all those questions?”
“Yes. But it wasn’t too bad this evening. At least we were talking about something real. I mean something that happened, today. It’s better than all those discussions where they ask you whether, as an astronaut, you believe in long hair, abortions, race relations, or the pill.”
“You’re a very public man, aren’t you? You say you’re not really into the space program anymore. But you’re doing public relations work for them right now.”
“Exactly what I’m doing. I don’t claim to be doing anything else. Except enjoying myself. They’re beginning to accept the idea of having a nonconformist doing front work for them.” Kamp glanced around. “Though I suspect compared to most of you guys here, even some of the ducks up at Roger’s, I’m more or less the image of the establishment, folk songs or not, hey? Well, that makes me Bellona’s biggest nonconformist. I don’t mind.”
“Questions like, did you leave, or were you kicked out—what do you do when people ask you the same questions over and over? Especially the embarrassing ones.”
“If you’re a public man, as soon as you get a question more than three times, you figure out the most honest public answer you can give. Especially to the embarrassing ones.
“Is that a question you get asked a lot?”
“Well,” Kamp mulled, “more times than three.”
“Then I guess it would be okay to ask you questions about the moon.” Kid grinned.
Kamp nodded. “Sounds like a pretty safe topic.”
“Can you tell me something about the moon you’ve never told anybody else before?”
After a second, Kamp laughed. “Now that is a new one. I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“You were there. I’d like to know something about the moon that someone could only know who was actually on it. I don’t mean anything big. But just something.”