He opens another beer. The pull-tab breaks, so he has to find the rusty old church key underneath everything in the knife drawer. He heats up two Salisbury steak dinners; while waiting for the oven to preheat to 400°, he reads the ingredients listed on the package: water, beef, peas, dehydrated potato flakes, bread crumbs, mushrooms, flour, butter, margarine, salt, maltodextrin, tomato paste, corn starch, Worcestershire sauce, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, monosodium glutamate, nonfat dry milk, dehydrated onions, flavoring, sugar, caramel color, spice, cysteine and thiamine hydrochloride, gum arabic. There is no clue from the picture on the tinfoil where all this stuff fits in. He always thought gum arabic was something you erased with. Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he’ll always know. He’ll never know how to talk Chinese or how screwing an African princess feels. The six o’clock news is all about space, all about emptiness: some bald man plays with little toys to show the docking and undocking maneuvers, and then a panel talks about the significance of this for the next five hundred years. They keep mentioning Columbus but as far as Rabbit can see it’s the exact opposite: Columbus flew blind and hit something, these guys see exactly where they’re aiming and it’s a big round nothing. The Salisbury steak tastes of preservative and Nelson eats only a few bites. Rabbit tries to joke him into it: “Can’t watch TV without a TV dinner.” They channel-hop, trying to find something to hold them, but there is nothing, it all slides past until, after nine, on Carol Burnett, she and Gomer Pyle do an actually pretty funny skit about the Lone Ranger. It takes Rabbit back to when he used to sit in the radio-listening armchair back on Jackson Road, its arms darkened with greasespots from the peanut-butter crackersandwiches he used to stack there to listen with. Mom used to have a fit. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night The Lone Ranger came on at seven-thirty, and if it was summer you’d come in from kick-the-can or three-stops-or-a-catch and the neighborhood would grow quiet all across the back yards and then at eight the doors would slam and the games begin again, those generous summer days, just enough dark to fit sleep into, a war being fought across oceans so he could spin out his days in such happiness, in such quiet growing. Eating Wheaties, along with Jack Armstrong, and Jell-O, which brought you Jack Benny.

In this skit the Lone Ranger has a wife. She stamps around a cabin saying how she hates housework, hates her lonely life. “You’re never home,” she says, “you keep disappearing in a cloud of dust with a hearty ‘Heigh-ho, Silver.’ ” The unseen audience laughs, Rabbit laughs. Nelson doesn’t see what’s so funny. Rabbit tells him, “That’s how they always used to introduce the program.”

The kid says crossly, “I know, Dad,” and Rabbit loses the thread of the skit a little, there has been a joke he didn’t hear, whose laughter is dying.