The heaters in the cafe were baking them like two bread buns. Both men wished to be colder. They considered the challenge of talking through a biting wind and both agreed it would build character. ‘Building character,’ meant doing something to make your life appear more interesting than it was.

Outside they found a small metal table in the nook of an alley. It had two seats.

“Take a seat, please,” said the older man. It was polite to offer a seat before one sat.

“No, after you,” said the younger man. It was polite to reciprocate the offer, but only after rejecting the first.

The older man sat down. The younger man sat down.

They were both sitting.

The older man familiarized the younger man with the weather before him: “A beautiful, blue day.” The younger man nodded, he said these were the types of days he liked the most. The type of day he liked the most was this: a beautiful, blue one.

The older man cupped his hands over his mouth and blew into them, then rubbed them together like he was fritzing up cat fur. The younger man wondered if this meant the older man was cold, but he didn’t want to believe it without asking first. “Cold?” said the younger man. The older man nodded his head up and down, up and down. The older man was saying yes. Or the older man was agreeing with something that had been said. Or the older man wasn’t listening, but wanted the younger man to think he was. A head nod could mean all of these.

The older man nodded because, yes, he was cold.

The older man decided the younger man would be interested in the recent work he’d done on his house. “Just finished up a big job on the house.”

“Hmm,” said the younger man and he nodded his head up and down, up and down.

“Woodlice,” the older man said.

“Hmm?” said the younger man.

“Bit right through the deck. It was sagging like a wet lasagne.” A wet lasagne was a layered pasta pie that had been left out in the rain. A lasagne is not supposed to be left outside. The older man told the younger man that to fix his deck, he had to buy twelve two-by-fours. They must have been heavy, was what the younger man had to say about that.

The younger man now told the older man about how, from his perspective, the coffee tasted: bitter, and a little overcooked. From where he sat, the older man said his coffee tasted “swell.” They both had ordered the same drink.

Here’s the thing: the older man had once had ten-thousand taste-buds all over his tongue. They covered it so well it looked full and pink in the mirror. Taste-buds were tiny devices that told you the flavour of things. The only way someone could know what your taste-buds told you was if you told them. Sometimes people lied about what their taste-buds were tasting. The older man had only one-hundred taste-buds now. He didn’t lie about what he had tasted, he just could not taste correctly.

The younger man started a little jig with his knee. He did it like this: up, down, up, down, bouncing on his toe. It was the way for his body to release the energy that it had been given. He had been given the energy by his drink. This great amount of energy he was now harnessing to have this conversation with the older man.

Now some snow started to fall and the younger kindly informed the older man of the situation. “It’s snowing,” said the younger man.

“So it is,” said the older man, and he looked up for a bit. Looking up was a nice way to pretend you were so focused and interested on something that you weren’t nervous about the lull in the conversation.

The younger man and the older man sat in silence. It wasn’t awkward because the older man was so interested in what was above him, in the sky. When he looked back down, he saw the younger man across from him. He was surprised to find him there, because the older man had short-term memory loss. The younger man did not notice that the older man was incapable of holding memories for very long, but this was not the first event and he was now suspicious. The older man did not know he could not hold memories for very long because they were his memories.

“A beautiful day,” said the older man. The younger man nodded up, down, up, down.

The older man wondered what state the younger man’s deck was in. The younger man didn’t have a deck. He didn’t have a house either. He didn’t have much money actually – if you asked him why, he said, “The economy.” That’s what he had heard many other people say when they said they didn’t have money, and so he had adopted this turn of phrase too.

“You don’t have a house? Hmm.” said the older man. He was contemplating how the younger man could not have a house. He remembered when he was that young, he had already paid of his mortgage. A mortgage was money that a bank lent, in the hopes that you did not pay it back so that you had to pay them more money later on.

“The economy,” said the younger man. The older man nodded: this was a satisfactory answer. He understood well.

This was a good time, it suddenly occurred to the older man, for an immunology lesson. He told the younger man all the things he had read about immunology the other day in a web article that had been emailed to him. The younger man hadn’t asked to be told about immunology. The younger man asked the name of the web article. The older man couldn’t recall it.

Here’s the thing: the younger man was studying medicine at night college. He knew quite a bit about his immune system, in fact. The older man was talking about the discovery of ribosomes. These were not part of the immune system, really.

On this planet, it is impolite to tell someone older than you that they are wrong.

In fact, telling anyone they are wrong on this planet is discouraged. This is because people take very personally the information they store. If someone has some information in their brain and it is wrong, they think you are telling them that their whole brain is wrong.

No one wants to have a wrong brain.

The older man had thousands of tiny holes in his brain. Trained people that cut brains into apple slices to study these holes named this ailment, ‘dementia.’ There was a cure for the older man’s holed brain, but here was the tricky part: the brain was wrapped in bone and flesh and so no one could see it and tell you it looked like a block of cheese.

If you asked them nicely and paid them large amounts of money, some people could see your brain. It was drawn for them on a screen by a machine that could take photos that turned flesh and bone invisible. The younger man had no money to pay people to look at his brain because of the economy. The older man had lots of money to pay people to look at his brain. But he had earned all his money after his brain had grown holes, so it was no use to him.

Instead he spent his money on two-by-fours for his deck.

The younger man pointed out the royal blue cashmere scarf around a lady’s neck on the other side of the street. The older man nodded and said, “Humph.” The thing is, the older man had holes in so many places in his brain that it no longer did a good job at keeping the thread. ‘Keeping the thread’ meant to not let your thought go, just like you don’t want to drop your thread when patching up a hole in a shirt. The older man forgot to finish his lecture on immunology.

The younger man had finished his coffee two minutes after they had sat down. The younger man had spent years training his mouth on very hot liquids. He could drink boiling soup straight from the pot. The older man had not sipped his coffee yet. In fact, whenever he looked away from it, he completely lost the thread.

At some point, the older man decided this had been a very good amount of time that they had spent together and it was time, now, for him to go and buy some two-by-fours.

“Got to go and buy those two-by-fours,” said the older man. The older man asked if he wanted to know what the two-by-fours were four. “For a deck?” guessed the younger man.

The older man was floored.

“You’re a clued-in lad,” said the older man. This meant that the younger man had no holes in his brain yet.

The younger man asked if the older man wanted to finish his drink before they left. The older man chuckled. The older man chuckled because he didn’t hear what the younger man had said, but was not interested to ask him to say it again. The older man was ashamed that he couldn’t hear so well. He didn’t think his ears were any worse. He thought, instead, that people were softer-spoken and less assertive than in the old days.

Here’s the thing: the mechanical parts of the older man’s ears were riddled with holes too.

The older man had a large amount of money. He had worked for forty years as a mechanic in a car shop. People drove their cars to him when they had a hole or two, and he patched up their holes. People paid him because the holes in their cars were hidden by bits of metal.

Many people had fantastic cars. It was cheaper to inspect the holes of your car than the holes of your brain. And so many people had fantastic cars but could not drive them because their brains were blocks of cheese.

One time the older man had gone to a neurologist. A neurologist was someone with a very expensive machine that could take photos of your brain and draw pictures of it. The neurologist had told the older man that there were no holes in his brain. He had spent a long time studying the machine’s drawing of the older man’s brain. The older man was ecstatic. This meant that the older man did not need to come back for another appointment.

The neurologist had accidentally studied the wrong drawing.

The older man could only afford one appointment because the neurologist had a degree which was difficult to get. Having a degree which was difficult to get meant you could charge people lots of money for your services.

Fixing the holes in a car was cheaper than fixing the holes in a brain. A mechanics degree was not difficult to get.

A third person joined the two men at the table. There wasn’t a third seat and so he stood nearby. His face was dark and sooty because he had not bathed in a six months. He conveniently offered a new topic of conversation: “Could you spare some change?”

This was a turn of phrase on their planet. It meant: do you have any coins in your wallet that are inconveniently lumpy? Both the older man and the younger man had coins in their pocket that were inconveniently lumpy.

“No,” said the older man.

“The economy,” said the younger man.

The sooty man left them to find a table that might be more interested in talking about finance. He rubbed his hands together like he was fritzing up cat fur, and sent soot around him like a dark cloud.

It was now cold enough outside that the older man had started to shiver. The younger man recommended that they go inside because it was getting too cold for the older man. The older man told the younger man that this was nothing.

The two went inside to return their coffee cups. The older man took a deep interest in the door. He ran his hand along it like he was inspecting fabric he wished to purchase. “That’s good wood,” he told the younger man. The younger man hadn’t asked whether the wood was good, but the older man decided this was essential fact to know.

The cups went in the left bin, the plates in the centre bin, and the utensils in the right bin. The older man put everything in the right bin. The coffee in his cup spilled out and made a brown bath for the forks and knives. The older man knew he had sorted things wrong, but it wasn’t his job to sort the cups and plates and utensils of the cafe.

“Not my job,” muttered the older man.

Before they departed, the older man patted the younger man on the shoulder and said, “You’re a good lad.” On their planet, this meant: “I love you.” This is important: one man was not allowed to know the honest contents of another man’s brain – he might notice that it was riddled with holes. No one wanted to know their brain was a block of cheese.

“Iloveyoudad,” said the younger man. He had in fact said, “I love you, dad,” but he spoke very quickly and very quietly because if any other man heard him say it, he would be pummelled to pulp. Men pummelled to pulp other men if they spoke the true contents of their brain.

Before the two men parted, they interlocked their hands and shook them up and down, up and down. They made sure to do this for no longer than a second. The younger man headed down the street. The older man lived in the opposite direction, and so he headed up the street. The younger man thought about how he might be able to earn more money to pay for someone to look for holes in his father’s brain. The older man thought about the beautiful blue sky and two-by-fours.