"So your children call. Your lawyer calls. The important thing is how much do your ashes weigh. Because this is costing you-guess."

"I can't guess."

"Guess," Eddie said.

"You have to tell me."

"Ten thousand dollars a pound."

Eddie worked this line with a finality that had a grim pleasure in it.

"A pound. What do we weigh, in ashes, when we're dead?" Albert said. "I think it sounds reasonable myself."

"You think it sounds reasonable. Then you ruin my story."

"A pound of ashes, Eddie. That could be a whole family. For burial in space. Preserved forever."

"You ruin my story," he said.

Albert used the rake comb, working the top of his friend's head. He combed in sweeping motions, letting the hair settle, then combing again. He loved this work. He used the scissors sparingly up here because a mistake might show. He moved the comb softly through Eddie's thinning hair. He lifted the hair, then let it fall. Mercedes played the radio in the kitchen, making dinner or maybe lunch. Albert was vague, lately, on the subject of time. A heartbeat, a wrist pulse, a tapping foot. This was discernible time. He lifted the hair, then let it fall.

"You miss the booth, Eddie."

"I liked my job."

"I know you did."

"All those years and never once."

"They never robbed you."

"Never even tried," he said.

That's the genius of New York. Eddie Robles with a miniature chess set practicing moves at two in the morning in his token booth and don't think people didn't pop their faces in the slot and challenge him to a game, and don't think he didn't play them because he did, behind five layers of bulletproof glass, with trains blowing by in the night.

"I never thought today's the day they rob me. I never had this thought. And it never happened. I had a woman vomit in the slot. My worst incident personally. I never thought what I would do if they tried to rob me. I had the psychology you plan for it, then it happens. She puts her hands on the ledge and out it comes."

"Middle of the night?"

"Just her and me. You have to vomit, why can't you do it on the tracks? Her and me alone in the station, she comes right over like the coin slot they intend it just for this."

He plugged in the clipper and did the back of Eddie's neck. He went down under the towel and the shirt collar and did the hair that grew up from the shoulders. He cleared the neck completely and dusted with the brush and asked Mercedes for some talcum powder, which was the one thing he did not have in the cigar box, and he made a mental note to resupply, for next time.

Space burial. He thought of the contrails on that blue day out over the ocean, two years ago if that's when it was-how the boosters sailed apart and hung the terrible letter Y in the still air. The vapor stayed intact for some time, the astronauts fallen to sea but also still up there, graved in frozen smoke, and he lay awake in the night and saw that deep Atlantic sky and thought this death was soaring and clean, an exalted thing, a passing of the troubled body into vapor and flame, out above the world, monogrammed, the Y of dying young.

He wasn't sure people wanted to see this. Willing to see the systems failure and the human suffering. But the beauty, the high faith of space, how could such qualities be linked to death? Seven men and women. Their beauty and ours, revealed in a failed mission as we haven't seen it in a hundred triumphs. Apotheosis. Yes they were god-statured, transformed in those swanny streaks into the only sort of gods he cared to acknowledge, poetic and fleeting. He found this experience even more profound than the first moonwalk. That was stirring but also a little walkie-talkie, with ghosted action, movements that looked computerized, and he could never completely dismiss the suspicions of the paranoid elite, the old grizzled gurkhas of the corps, that, the whole thing had been staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas.

In the spring they were still there, Albert and Laura. How was it possible his sister had not fallen into some calamitous illness? You sit there, you let your body go weak and slack, you don't walk, you don't see people, or mingle, or feel the bloodflow of inquisitive interest.

But he was grateful for her presence. There had always been a woman close to him, one woman at least, a woman or a girl, sharing the bathroom, the kitchen, long ago the bed. He needed this company. Women and their pride of time, their vigorous sense of a future. He married a Jew and loved her but Klara's future did not include him. He took care of his mother, a Catholic of the old eloquence, wearing a scapular, blessing herself and touching her thumb-knuckle to her lips, and he loved her and watched her die. He raised his daughter to make her own fate, to be a worthy individual outside compliance with religious rites, and he loved her, she lives in Vermont now, very much. And his sister, drifting in and out of the past but knowing him always in uncanny ways, seeing straight into his unadorned heart, and he loved her for all the stammered reasons you love a sister and because she'd narrowed her life to a few remarks that he found moving.

He had a portable phonograph, sleek-seeming once, advanced design. Now looked drab and squat but still played music after all these years. He found the record he was looking for and polished the vinyl with a treated cloth and placed it hostlike on the spindle. Saint-Saens, piano works, gentle and pensive, a change of pace from the gorgeous torment of Bronzini's operas, the tabloid sensation that shatters teacups. He turned to make sure Laura was here, shapeless in the armchair, head resting against the hand-knit antimacassar, face lifted to the chords. He clicked the dial and watched the tone arm rise and the record descend, a jerky downslide to the turntable. Then the tone arm shifted laterally and the disc began to spin and this series of laboriously linked actions with their noises and pauses and teeterings, their dimwit delays, seemed to place him in some lost mechanical age with the pendulum clock and hand-cranked motorcar.

The needle slurred some notes but he was used to that. He sat at the edge of the room, where he could feel the kitchen sun and look at Laura's face. The music joined them edgewise. He believed he could enter her reverie. He could know her, almost know her, feel her innocence through the music, know the girl again, the spinsterly twelve-year-old who walked behind her parents in the street, he could see her in the face of the somber older sister, she was almost there, the girl, in the pouches and moles and smoky hair. There was a brief moment in one of the pieces, after passagework of mellow recollection, when something dark seemed to enter, the soloist's left hand urging the tempo, and it made her raise an arm, slowly, a gesture of half shock, thoughtful and fraught-she'd heard a boding in the bass notes that startled her. And this was the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in the music-how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an odd sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life.

"You have to tell me, Albert, when you're going out. So I know." "I did tell you." "You never tell me." "I do tell you."

"I don't know if you forget or what's the reason." "I will tell you." "If you tell me, then I know." "I will tell you. I will be sure to tell you." "But I forget, don't I?" "Sometimes, yes." "You tell me and I forget." "Sometimes. It's not important." "But you have to tell me." "I will. I will tell you." "So this way I know," she said.