"Wait a minute, Dr. Moriss," I said. "Paula and I are going out for a walk first."
"That can wait a half hour," he said. "I just want to show you—my body." He chuckled.
"It can't wait," I said, "and even if it could I want a breath of fresh air before going into that lab."
"He's been sick for three days without being out," Paula said. "Stop being so selfish, dad."
"That's unkind, Paula," Dr. Moriss said, "but go ahead." He turned back into his study.
We walked along sidewalks hand in hand, with kids playing catch and hop-skip as hazards, and shapeless, harassed women struggling home with overloaded shopping bags.
We heard the dying wail of sirens and saw a crowd at a corner, and joined it to watch the callous internes lift a screaming woman onto a stretcher while she repeated, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God," over and over, and a white faced teenage boy kept repeating to an unsympathetic but silent police officer, "I didn't see her. I didn't see her. I didn't see her."
We had coffee and hamburgers in a smelly, ten stool hole-in-the-wall served by a jovial, potbellied cook-and-waiter who sweated olive oil profusely over a dirty griddle, while his cracked jukebox blared out music from cracked records—and looked at each other and laughed when we couldn't talk above the noise.
On impulse we climbed aboard a streetcar just as it was starting up, and grinned at the conductor when he yelled above the noise, "Watch it. Wanta get killed?" And sat very close together while the ancient monument to a past civilization thundered on, on what promised to be its last trip.