Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious. 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.

“Curiosity,” my grandfather decided, and stuck out his tongue. I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats.

Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.

But while he was a family man and loved us all in his wordless way, he was also, to the core, a solitary.

Unlike his wife, he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive.

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

“I was not ready for her,” he told me. “I was totally unprepared.”

She sketched with an efficiency of gesture that came as close as anything he remembered having seen to what poets and sportswriters liked to call grace.

am the one who look like the gargoyle,” she said. “Hardly.” “Yes,” she said. “On the inside.”

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother’s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone’s head, he figured; in my grandmother’s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.

From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her, he might also be mended.

gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack.

My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else.

It was not that my grandfather felt no fear. “I was afraid the whole time,” he told me. “From the minute I got there. Even when no one was shooting at me or trying to drop a bomb on my head. But whenever they did shoot at me, what happened was, it made me angry, too.”

“And the anger trumped.” “It was, you know, it flooded over me.” “Yeah.” “It just washed everything else away. That was the time . . . In my whole life, that was the time I got some use out of it. When somebody was shooting at me.” He twisted his mouth. “But I didn’t know until that day it worked with arrows, too.”

The only choice that seemed to remain, seven years after he inscribed his copy of The Magic Mountain, was a choice between faith and numbness.

At close range, he had been exposed to the horror of the human body’s fragility, its liability to burst open, to be ripped in two, to deliver up its pulp through a split in the outer peel. He had suffered bombardment, gun barrage, loneliness, foolish commanders, and a two-month case of the GIs. He had lost Aughenbaugh. He had killed a boy who was shooting at him with a burp gun. Apart from the fact that he was, as a result, still alive, that was one person more than he ever wanted to kill again. Along the way he had captured or had a hand in the capture of men of science—one who had taught chemistry at Princeton before the war, another whose medical research had been funded by a Rockefeller—in laboratories and proving grounds dedicated to the cultivation of fatal toxins and missile-borne plagues.

In the face of all that, my grandfather had come down on th...

Now, watching the old priest comfort the dying man in low, musical Latin, my grandfather felt some inner tether come unlashed. His cheeks burned. His eyes stung. For the first and only time in his life, he felt the beauty that inhered in the idea of Jesus Christ, in the message of comfort that had managed to survive, reasonably intact, despite having been so thoroughly corrupted and profaned over the past two thousand years by Christians.

Staring old people, staring children, staring women and girls. Staring amputees on crutches. The stares did not seem hostile, sullen, or resentful. Nor were they the stares of people watching their fondest wish come true. Some people smiled. Others turned bright red as though fighting tears or shame. Some did both at once.

War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe.

While drunk, he would repeat foul blasphemies he had learned in the army. These did not offend Father Nickel, who had heard everything, but he knew that God was less forgiving, and he worried about the fate of his former protégé’s soul.

The relative order or disorder of my grandmother’s “studio” was as

reliable a gauge as any of the tenor of her mind. There were others: whether or not she greeted him by name when he walked in the door or called out a goodbye on her own departure. Whether she was in the middle of her cycle or a week before the end. If she brought him coffee in bed, that was a good sign. If she felt appreciated by the world. If there were cut flowers in the vases and jars; if the flowers were fresh: good signs. Empty vases were bad and dead flowers worse. If she touched her fingers to the back of his neck as though noticing it for the first time—as though noticing him for the first time—that could be a good sign. If it was not February. If she did not get out her deck of fortune-telling cards and waste hours laying them out in crosses and grids. If she did not linger in the cave mouths of Catholic churches but only passed them by. If she was not lost for the hundredth time in Vincent’s letters to Theo or the Fioretti of Saint Francis. If it was not a Sunday; Sundays were the worst.

The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.

At the beginning it was an unarticulated hope expressed only in a mutual disregard of birth control, a hope shared by many survivors of war and calamity to counter general death with a particular life, to light a candle in the universal night.

The night turned authentically menacing. My grandfather could not bear the thought of my grandmother abroad in it. Hurting from the inside. Emptied out. She had been pregnant and she had miscarried and then the voice or the thoughts or the memory that tormented her had returned: her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending, flooding back into her body as that tablespoonful of life leaked out. Her true companion. Her lover with his bleached bones showing and his maddened eyes.

It was a marvelous idea, and he backed away from it, giving it space; you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out.

“You think this explains everything,”

“Me and your grandmother. Your mother. My time in prison. The war.” He turned from the window. In his eyes, through the haze of hydromorphone, I saw a flash of something I took, based on the historical record, for anger. “You think it explains you.” “It explains a lot,” I said. “It explains nothing.” “It explains a little.” “It’s just names and dates and places.” “Okay.” “It doesn’t add up to anything, take my word for it. It doesn’t mean anything.” “I get it,” I said. “Oh, you get it? What do you get?” “I get that you’re a big ol’ fuckin’ nihilist.”

The answer was always going to be dates, and names, and numbers. And that was good enough for Feynman, because the point was to find out. The meaning was in the inquiry.”

“I’m disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around. I’m ashamed of

myself.” “I’m not ashamed of you,” I said. “I’m proud.”

On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.

Afterward both Allied and German damage assessments agreed that the raid—which also cost the lives of two hundred British airmen—had set the rocket program back by eight weeks at most.

That’s you, he told himself. You are Cepheus. You are not Perseus. You are not a hero. It’s not your job to rescue anybody. But he could not sustain the planetarium show tonight. There was too much light pouring in from the stanchion outside his window. There was still a tang of vomit in the air.

“I guess. I don’t know. She was . . . She was overly concerned with appearances. With how things looked, how they seemed, what people would think and say about her. She heard, I mean, you know that she heard voices, and they used to say awful, just horrible, things about her. On the outside she was beautiful, but on the inside she felt ugly. She felt ruined. And she was so afraid of having that come out.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell him that I know that you know that he knows what nobody wants to talk about.” “What’s the point of talking about it?” my mother said. “Everybody already knows.”

Wanting to know what went wrong. Thinking I could fix her. But I don’t want to think of her like that anymore, you know, looking for the bad capacitor. I just want to, I mean . . . I accept her and I . . .” He was going to say that he loved my grandmother, but that didn’t feel like something one man ought to bother another man with. “She’s broken, I’m broken,” he said. “Everybody’s broken. If she’s not in misery anymore, I’ll take it.”

past. I saw that my tower was made of stories in two senses of the word. I experienced this not as a pun but as an enigmatic metaphor. I assumed there must be a reason that buildings were said to be made out of narratives or, conversely, that narratives were seen to be the stacked components of mysterious towers in some way I couldn’t grasp. Maybe it had something to do, I thought, with the Tower of Babel. I wanted to ask my grandfather, but then I would have to explain to him exactly how my grandmother made use of the cards. I felt that he would approve of her telling stories, or at least the kind of stories she used to tell me, even less than he evidently approved of her telling fortunes.

“Why didn’t God want them to build the Tower of Babel?” I said. “Why did He make it so everybody couldn’t understand each other?” “You know I don’t believe in God.” “I know.” “Probably there was just a ziggurat, you know what a ziggurat is? Over in Mesopotamia. Maybe it was in ruins. Maybe it was only halfway built, left unfinished. And they made up a story to explain what happened to it, why it looked incomplete.” “Oh.” “You understand what I’m saying?” I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.

heroism (if there was such a thing) would always be the residue of training. If you had been well trained, then adventure was something you hoped to avoid.

“If your wife, your brother, or God forbid, your child dies. It leaves a big hole in your life. It’s much better not to pretend there’s no hole. Not to try to, what do they say nowadays, get over it.”

I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.

kaddish.

First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah.

Over the course of the past year he had trusted, in the absence of evidence, that in time, if he stuck to the formula prescribed by the kaddish, it would

work in this instance as it had when his parents died, his mother shortly after his father.

Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.

The ideals of justice, of openness, of protecting the weak—of fundamental decency—for which he had fought, and Alvin Aughenbaugh and so many others had died, meant nothing to the country that espoused them. They were encumbrances to be circumvented in the exercise of power. They had not, in fact, survived the war. This last implied that: 4. In a fundamental way both proved and exemplified by the spectacular postwar ascent of Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany had won the war.