Pat smiled with confusion—the Irish call it a shit-eating grin—as he realized the interview had veered back to the moonshot.

“‘How do you go to the bathroom in space?’” Frank Borman shook his head. “So I tell them all about the waste management protocols. For number one, we had this tube, and you roll on the condom, open the valve, and try to go—with your Johnson Space Center there connected to the vacuum and the void. And then you dump it and it freezes into droplets of ice that are iridescent in the sunlight. It’s quite beautiful actually.”

Pat could swear that Borman was almost floating off the ground in memory of pissing into space. “Now, number two is much trickier, and I should know. The first twenty-four hours of the Apollo mission I was sick as a dog. Could have been flu, but I now think it was my last meal on Earth, steak and eggs, was undercooked. Lord knows, but I had diarrhea, and in a space suit that is just not going to work out for you. So NASA had come up with this flypaper thing for your rear end, and what a mess, and so that doesn’t work, and now we’re chasing it around with paper towels.”

Borman told the story with utter seriousness, and Pat had no idea how to react to the fact that he had turned Apollo 8 into a flying shitcan.

“And Anders and Lovell are downplaying it—last thing we wanted was to stay in Earth orbit and scratch the mission.”

All these astronaut stories—maybe Colonel Borman is trying to impress me and carry on as a way of getting me to come to Eastern.

“So that’s the story I tell these kids. I went faster and farther than any human at that point.” Borman shook his head and let go of the invisible controls. “And what I really needed was a commode.”

“Did the Eastern stewardess at least offer you a blanket and a magazine?” Pat found himself yelling a little as he noticed the thread for Borman’s hearing aid.

“Ha!” The joke landed, and Borman cracked a smile. “Yes, she worked the first leg, but because of union rules, we had to leave her on the moon.”

“So who served drinks on the ride back?”

“I tell you, these labor issues could drive you to drink, but I’m a teetotaler now.” Borman’s tone was instantly stern. He turned away from his wall of fame toward the glass slab of his desk. Pat followed, waiting to take a seat. “You’ve probably heard about my wife, Susie, and her problems.”

Pat shrugged. He noticed a plaque on Borman’s desk: ex aequo et bono.