Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the Hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig’s blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie’s gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paper clips onto its wings.
Robbie winced at the memory. He gulped what was left of his bourbon and sighed. “That was a long time ago.”
“Tempus fugit, baby. Thinking of which—” Emery dug into his pocket for a BlackBerry. “Check this out. From Leonard.”
Robbie rubbed his eyes blearily, then read.
From: [email protected]
/* */
Subject: Tragic Illness
Date: April 6, 7:58:22 P.M. EDT
To: [email protected]
/* */
Dear Emery,
I just learned that our Maggie Blevin is very ill. I wrote her at Christmas but never heard back. Fuad El-Hajj says she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer last fall. Prognosis is not good. She is still in the Fayetteville area, and I gather is in a hospice. I want to make a visit though not sure how that will go over. I have something I want to give her but need to talk to you about it.
L.
“Ahhh.” Robbie sighed. “God, that’s terrible.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. But I figured you’d want to know.”
Robbie pinched the bridge of his nose. Four years earlier, his wife, Anna, had died of breast cancer, leaving him adrift in a grief so profound it was as though he’d been poisoned, as though his veins had been pumped with the same chemicals that had failed to save her. Anna had been an oncology nurse, a fact that at first afforded some meager black humor, but in the end deprived them of even the faintest of false hopes borne of denial or faith in alternative therapies.
There was no time for any of that. Zach, their son, had just turned twelve. Between his own grief and Zach’s subsequent acting out, Robbie got so depressed that he started pouring his first bourbon and Coke before the boy left for school. Two years later, he got fired from his job with the county parks commission.
He now worked in the shipping department at Small’s, an off-price store in a desolate shopping mall that resembled the ruins of a regional airport. Robbie found it oddly consoling. It reminded him of the museum. The same generic atriums and industrial carpeting; the same bleak sunlight filtered through clouded glass; the same vacant-faced people trudging from Dollar Store to Sunglass Hut, the way they’d wandered from the General Aviation Gallery to Cosmic Soup.
“Poor Maggie.” Robbie returned the BlackBerry. “I haven’t thought of her in years.”
“I’m going to see Leonard.”
“When? Maybe I’ll go with you.”
“Now.” Emery shoved a twenty under his beer bottle and stood. “You’re coming with me.”
“What?”
“You can’t drive—you’re snackered. Get popped again, you lose your license.”
“Popped? Who’s getting popped? And I’m not snackered, I’m—” Robbie thought. “Snockered. You pronounced it wrong.”
“Whatever.” Emery grabbed Robbie’s shoulder and pushed him to the door. “Let’s go.”
Emery drove an expensive hybrid that could get from Rockville to Utica, New York, on a single tank of gas. The vanity plate read MARVO and was flanked by bumper stickers with messages like GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE: TYPE 2 PHASERS KILL PEOPLE and FRAK OFF! as well as several slogans that Emery said were in Klingon.
Emery was the only person Robbie knew who was somewhat famous. Back in the early 1980s, he’d created a local-access cable TV show called Captain Marvo’s Secret Spacetime, taped in his parents’ basement and featuring Emery in an aluminum foil costume behind the console of a cardboard spaceship. Captain Marvo watched videotaped episodes of low-budget 1950s science fiction serials with titles like PAYLOA.D.: MOONDUST while bantering with his copilot, a homemade puppet made by Leonard, named Mungbean.
The show was pretty funny if you were stoned. Captain Marvo became a cult hit, and then a real hit when a major network picked it up as a late-night offering. Emery quit his day job at the museum and rented studio time in Baltimore. He sold the rights after a few years, and was immediately replaced by a flashy actor in Lurex and a glittering robot sidekick. The show limped along for a season then died. Emery’s fans claimed this was because their slacker hero had been sidelined.
But maybe it was just that people weren’t as stoned as they used to be. These days the program had a surprising afterlife on the Internet, where Robbie’s son, Zach, watched it with his friends, and Emery did a brisk business selling memorabilia through his official Captain Marvo Web site.
It took them nearly an hour to get into D.C. and find a parking space near the Mall, by which time Robbie had sobered up enough to wish he’d stayed at the bar.
“Here.” Emery gave him a sugarless breath mint, then plucked at the collar of Robbie’s shirt, acid green with SMALLS embroidered in purple. “Christ, Robbie, you’re a freaking mess.”
He reached into the backseat, retrieved a black T-shirt from his gym bag. “Here, put this on.”
Robbie changed into it and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. It was mid-April but already steamy; the air shimmered above the pavement and smelled sweetly of apple blossom and coolant from innumerable air conditioners. Only as he approached the museum entrance and caught his reflection in a glass wall did Robbie see that his T-shirt was emblazoned with Emery’s youthful face and foil helmet above the words O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN.
“You wear your own T-shirt?” he asked as he followed Emery through the door.
“Only at the gym. Nothing else was clean.”
They waited at the security desk while a guard checked their IDs, called upstairs to Leonard’s office, signed them in and took their pictures before finally issuing each a visitor’s pass.
“You’ll have to wait for Leonard to escort you upstairs,” the guard said.
“Not like the old days, huh, Robbie?” Emery draped an arm around Robbie and steered him into the Hall of Flight. “Not a lot of retinal scanning on your watch.”