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　　No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man's landbeyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts andbrownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around atother people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn't need light and space. We certainly didn'tneed to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes.

　　We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor inthis. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed,in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood ofintense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormouslyhungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edgeof the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate theskin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings weretastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Cray lazing naked on a motelbed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Thenwe started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.

　　Steffie said quietly, "How do astronauts float?"There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.

　　Denise stopped eating to say, 'They're lighter than air."We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.

　　"There is no air," Heinrich said finally. "They can't be lighter than something that isn't there. Space is a vacuumexcept for heavy molecules.""I thought space was cold," Babette said. "If there's no air, how can it be cold? What makes warm or cold? Air, or soI thought. If there's no air, there should be no cold. Like a nothing kind of day.""How can there be nothing?" Denise said. "There has to be something."'There is something," Heinrich said in exasperation. 'There's heavy molecules.""Do-I-need-a-sweater kind of day," Babette said.

　　There was another pause. We waited to learn if the dialogue was over. Then we set to eating again. We tradedunwanted parts in silence, stuck our hands in cartons of rippled fries. Wilder liked the soft white fries and peoplepicked these out and gave them to him. Denise distributed ketchup in little watery pouches.

　　The interior of the car smelled of grease and licked flesh. We traded parts and gnawed.

　　Steffie said in a small voice, "How cold is space?"We all waited once more. Then Heinrich said, "It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets.""Wait a minute," Babette said. "The higher you go, the closer you get to the sun. So the warmer it gets.""What makes you think the sun is high?""How can the sun be low? You have to look up to see the sun.""What about at night?" he said.

　　"It's on the other side of the earth. But people still look up.""The whole point of Sir Albert Einstein," he said, "is how can the sun be up if you're standing on the sun?""The sun is a great molten ball," she said. "It's impossible to stand on the sun.""He was just saying 'if.' Basically there is no up or down, hot or cold, day or night.""What is there?""Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting offthe surface of giant stars.""If there's no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?""Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can't just grunt.""It's called the sun's corolla," Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. "We saw it the other night on theweather network.""I thought Corolla was a car," Steffie said.

　　"Everything's a car," Heinrich said. "The thing you have to understand about giant stars is that they have actualnuclear explosions deep inside the core. Totally forget these Russian IBMs that are supposed to be so awesome.

　　We're talking about a hundred million times bigger explosions."There was a long pause. No one spoke. We went back to eating for as long as it took to bite off and chew a singlemouthful of food.

　　"It's supposed to be Russian psychics who are causing this crazy weather," Babette said.

　　"What crazy weather?" I said.

　　Heinrich said, "............