The set is in Mom’s bedroom at the front of the house. It has the smell their cellar used to have when they had those two cats. He tries to remember their names. Pansy. And Willy. Willy, the tom, got in so many fights his belly began to slosh and he had to be taken to the Animal Rescue. There is no picture of the moon on the tube, just crackling voices while cardboard cutouts simulate what is happening, and electronic letters spell out who in the crackle of men is speaking.

“… literally thousands of little one and two foot craters around the area,” a man is saying in the voice that used to try to sell them Shredded Ralston between episodes of Tom Mix. “We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view just about on the ground track ahead of us. Difficult to estimate, but might be a half a mile or a mile.”

A voice identified as Houston says, “Roger, Tranquillity. We copy. Over.” The voice has that Texas authority. As if words were invented by them, they speak so lovingly. When Rabbit was stationed at Fort Larson in ’53, Texas looked like the moon to him, brown land running from his knees level as a knife, purple rumpled horizon, sky bigger and barer than he could believe, first time away from his damp green Pennsylvania hills, last time too. Everybody’s voice was so nice and gritty and loving, even the girls in the whorehouse. Honeh. You didn’t pay to be no two-timer.

A voice called Columbia says, “Sounds like a lot better than it did yesterday. At that very low sun angle, it looked rough as a cob then.” As a what? The electronic letters specify: MIKE COLLINS SPEAKING FROM COMMAND MODULE ORBITING MOON.

Tranquillity says, “It really was rough, Mike, over the targeted landing area. It was extremely rough, cratered and large numbers of rocks that were probably some many larger than five or ten feet in size.” Mom’s room has lace curtains aged yellowish and pinned back with tin daisies that to an infant’s eyes seemed magical, rose-and-thorns wallpaper curling loose from the wall above where the radiator safety valve steams, a kind of plush armchair that soaks up dust. When he was a child this chair was downstairs and he would sock it to release torrents of swirling motes into the shaft of afternoon sun; these whirling motes seemed to him worlds, each an earth, with him on one of them, unthinkably small, unbearably. Some light used to get into the house in late afternoon, between the maples. Now the same maples have thronged that light solid, made the room cellar-dim. The bedside table supports an erect little company of pill bottles and a Bible. The walls hold tinted photographs of himself and Mim in high school, taken he remembers by a pushy pudgy little blue-jawed crook who called himself a Studio and weaseled his way into the building every spring and made them line up in the auditorium and wet-comb their hair so their parents couldn’t resist two weeks later letting them take in to the homeroom the money for an 8 by 10 tinted print and a sheet of wallet-sized grislies of themselves; now this crook by the somersault of time has become a donor of selves otherwise forever lost: Rabbit’s skinny head pink in its translucent blond whiffle, his ears out from his head an inch, his eyes unreally blue as marbles, even his lower lids youthfully fleshy; and Miriam’s face plump between the shoulder-length shampoo-shining sheaves rolled under in Rita Hayworth style, the scarlet tint of her lipstick pinned like a badge on the starched white of her face. Both children smile out into space, through the crook’s smudged lens, from that sweat-scented giggling gym toward their mother bedridden some day.