Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark. —Wernher von Braun

This is how I heard the story.

Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention.

Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.

He was laughing.*

He saw children and animals beaten savagely and yet with patience and care.

“He isn’t lost,” Uncle Ray said, issuing the finding that ultimately prevailed in the family Talmud. “He knows where he is.”

But my grandfather understood Creasey the way you come to understand a man who repeatedly kicks your ass. The details of the hurt that Creasey might have done to this girl during his visit remained obscure, but my grandfather felt the outrage all the more vividly for his ignorance.

My grandfather felt there was more to her imprisonment than a lock and key, but he did not know how to put that feeling into words.

“A hermaphrodite was something. It has a little poetry. There is just no poetry in a bearded lady.”

They lived on the thirteenth floor, though it was styled the fourteenth because, my grandfather explained, the world was full of dummies who believed in lucky charms. It was bad luck, my grandfather said, to be a dummy.

She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.

To raise my grandfather’s bail, Ray required a week’s time, a supply of willing victims, and a surprise win by Hopeless Hope in the fifth at Hialeah.

Like many of the spouses of “the lucky ones,” my grandfather had observed that what got labeled luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature.

Like the rest of the house, it was not and would never be his property, but in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.

My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.

When I look at the Challenger mission photograph now, I don’t see the seven smilers, pretty Judy Resnick, or even, really, the model itself. I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives.

According to my grandfather, my grandmother’s first words to her future husband were: “Your head would look good on a fence.”

It crossed my grandfather’s mind to observe that Philly could be tough on cats, too, but then he would have to explain. It had been a long time since he had attempted to explain himself to a woman. It felt like an insurmountable task.

My grandfather was seventy-three. Over the course of his life, the definition and requirements of manhood had been subject to upheaval and reform. Like the electoral laws of his adopted home state, the end result was a mess.

On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moonman down. And on the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.

If her children studied her silence as she had studied their grandfather’s, they could hope to learn only that silence, that old folk remedy, was at best a partial antidote to pain.

Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.

My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler. Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka “God”) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.

In 1947 there was, to my grandfather, one reason to continue calling oneself a Jew, to go on being Jewish before the world: as a way of telling Hitler Fuck you.

The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged.

Essayons.