Читать книгу Moonglow - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 15

Just before midnight of September 29, 1989, my grandfather completed the model of LAV One. It represented the latest thinking on lunar settlement design (the reason it had needed so many revisions), fourteen years’ work, and about twenty-two thousand individual polystyrene pieces cannibalized from commercial model kits.* At the center of the model, amid the half-buried tunnels, bays, domes, huts, landing strips, and radar arrays, there was a hole about four inches in diameter. Looking down into this hole, you could see through to the plywood substructure of the model’s molded lunar surface. If you asked my grandfather the purpose of the hole, he would always give you some variation on You’ll just have to wait and find out; to be honest, there was not a lot of variation. After a while—no doubt according to his plan—I stopped asking.

He went to his workbench and took down a gaudy Romeo y Julieta cigar box. He removed a bundle of tissue paper from the box and unwrapped a circular structure fashioned from a take-out coffee-cup lid. He had initially completed the moon garden in May 1975, pillaging tiny n- and British OO-scale model train kits to fill it with flowering shrubs, rosebushes, and vegetables grown in hydroponic racks. With a careful thumbnail he lifted the lid’s sipping flap, which he had reconfigured as an access hatch. He peered in to check on the family who had replaced the original lovers as occupants of the moon garden. On a sling bench and two sling chairs of his own design, enjoying moist and oxygenated air, sat figures representing my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, and my brother and me. The figures were posed stiffly (even for polystyrene people), as if for a formal photograph. Everyone safe and sound.

My grandfather lowered the flap. He carried the moon garden to the model of LAV One and fitted it into the hole that awaited it. He was not aware of any great sense of accomplishment. It was a job he had left undone for too long, a promise too long unkept, and what he felt most was relief.

Six months later he would be dead.

The next morning, well before dawn, my grandfather went out into the dense Florida darkness to load the trunk of his Buick LeSabre for a trip to Cape Canaveral. There had been no launches since the Challenger disaster nearly four years earlier. Now another shuttle, Discovery, was scheduled to lift off that morning at ten. He had filled a bait cooler with a freezer pack, a bottle of Michelob, a plastic food container of cut-up pineapple, and two meat salad sandwiches. Meat salad was a specialty of my grandfather’s. You passed a piece of leftover roast through a meat grinder with some dill pickles, a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Like many of my grandfather’s specialties, meat salad tasted better than it looked or sounded, served on a nice challah roll. He put the cooler into the trunk with a pair of binoculars, a secondhand Leica with a brand-new telephoto lens, the latest issue of Commentary, a transistor radio, a gallon of tap water, and a reclining folding chair, complete with a footrest and a sun umbrella you could attach to the chair’s frame. He had made the sun umbrella himself, surgically replacing the handle of a rain umbrella with a C-clamp.

Like any habitation of the elderly, Fontana Village was rich in insomniacs and early birds, but for the moment my grandfather had the morning to himself. Before closing the trunk of his car, he leaned against the rear bumper and listened to the silence. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. But he had come to appreciate how small or distant sounds could intensify it, the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness. The tick-tick of an insect or possibly a frog. A big rig downshifting out on I-95. Mist effervescing in the beams of the security lighting. Underlying everything, the low-pitched tinnitus that was the sound of Fontana Village itself, a compound hum of air conditioners, vending machines, circuit breakers, swimming-pool filtration systems, poorly insulated wire. A woman’s voice, far away, calling out, “Ramon!”

My grandfather straightened up. He angled his head, his ear a dish attuned to the cosmic background radiation. He shuffled the short deck of Ramons he had encountered in his life. None of them lived in Fontana Village. There were some Cubans living at Fontana Village, and they sometimes had first names like Adolfo and Raquel, but they were Jews like everybody else, Goldmans and Levys come to the promised land of South Florida along a different branch of the river of exile. He did not know any of the Cuban Jews well. One of them might well be Ramon. Ramon Lifschitz. Ramon Weinblatt. From time to time some poor bastard with dementia went walkabout, and you would see his wife or the home care nurse running after him, shouting his name.

“Ramon! Hee-er, kittykittykitty.”

The voice seemed to be coming from the direction of the Jungle, as the residents of Fontana Village called the wasteland that bordered the retirement village to the north and east. In the Jungle, nuisance plants and Bermuda grass gone feral had been at war with native stranglers since the late seventies, contending for ownership over five hundred acres that was briefly a golf course and country club. Somewhere in that tangle a devourer of pets, widely believed to be an alligator, plied its leisurely trade.

“Ramo-ohn!”

On the second syllable the woman’s voice broke like a bar mitzvah boy’s. There had been amusement in her frustration before, but that was gone now.

My grandfather looked at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. It was already past five-thirty, and the trip north would take about three and a half hours, four if he stopped for gas and a toilet break. The return to service of the shuttle fleet had attracted considerable interest in the media, and traffic might be heavy. He really could not afford delay.

“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said.

He opened the well that held his tire-repair kit and took out the socket wrench without thinking about it or knowing why. He slammed shut the lid of the trunk. It thudded like a kettledrum in the humid air.

He crossed the parking lot, nervously gripping and renewing his grip on the shaft of the tire wrench, to a walkway lit at intervals. If you went right, the walkway led past the swimming pool that served this end of the complex. To the left, it wandered around the back of the cluster that included his own two-bedroom unit to a service area with a charging station for the carts that village residents used to get around. Past the service area, you came to a fairly wide strip of lawn backed by a running wooden rail about a foot high. After that, things became primeval.

My grandfather’s leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture, slapped against the pavement. It was an angry sound. He was annoyed with Ramon, whom he pictured lean and cross-eyed, skulking into the Jungle to meet his death, just for a taste of rat or nutria. He was annoyed with Ramon’s owner for coming out to look for Ramon when it was still pitch-dark and there was, at any rate, nothing to be done. There was nothing to be done, and yet off he went to try and do it; my grandfather was annoyed, most of all, with himself. The louder his sandals slapped against the pavement, the angrier he became. He found himself hoping that when he reached the edge of the Jungle, he really did encounter the alligator so that he could beat it to death with the socket wrench. That was the purpose, he now understood, for which he had taken the tool out of his trunk.

He crossed the northernmost of the lawns serviced by the groundskeepers of Fontana Village. The soles of his sandals kicked up pinpricks of dew that stung his shins. He was wearing khaki shorts, one of seven identical pairs he had purchased at Kmart, to go with the seven polo shirts and seven pairs of white tube socks, which he always wore with sandals, that constituted his daily uniform after my grandmother died. If it was somebody’s birthday or some function he could not avoid, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt, decorated with bare-breasted hula girls, that I had given him as a joke. The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.

Out here past the service area, it was too dark to see. My grandfather took out Aughenbaugh’s Zippo and struck a light. Tiny beads of moisture in the air trapped the light before it could travel very far. Light enveloped his hand like a ball of St. Elmo’s fire.

“Hello?” said the woman. “Who’s that?”

“Your neighbor,” my grandfather said.

The lighter grew hot against his skin and he snapped it shut. Retinal fire swam across the darkness. Then his eyes adjusted, and he found that he could see. Dawn was an abrupt business in Florida; in another ten minutes or so it would be morning.

“Mrs. Winocur claims to have seen it. She calls it Alastair,” said the woman. My grandfather heard her introduce herself as Sally Seashell; later the last name turned out to be Sichel. “But do you think it’s really out there?”

“Something’s there,” my grandfather said, never one to give false comfort. He thought Phyllis Winocur was full of shit, but he doubted that the cats and lapdogs of Fontana Village were vanishing voluntarily into the swamp in a bid for freedom, banding together out there like four-legged Seminoles. “How’d he get out?”

“My fault,” she said, “I was dumb. I took pity on him. Back home he used to range so freely. He and I haven’t been here long.”

“Where’s home?”

“Philly.”

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.

“What part?” he said.

“Bryn Mawr.”

“Bryn Mawr ain’t Philly.”

“Aha,” she said. “Yes, I can hear it in your voice.”

As it grew lighter, my grandfather came to see that Sally Sichel was a good-looking woman, tall, slender, but full-breasted. Dark complexion, long nose with a bump, a touch of Katharine Hepburn in the cheekbones. Maybe a couple of years younger than he was, maybe not. She wore a pair of men’s pajamas, the kind that buttoned up the front, and duck boots coated in rubber the color of a New York taxi. She had not troubled to lace them up very well.

“Does he usually come when you call him?”

“Always.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“All night.”

“Hmm.”

“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Sally Sichel said. “We just met. But that piece-of-shit cat is more or less my only reason for living.”

My grandfather fought against an overwhelming impulse to say something along the lines of In that case, maybe you ought not to have let him out of your house to be eaten by a half-ton reptile or For Christ’s sake, lady, it’s just a motherfucking cat. He revised downward the favorable impression he had begun to form of her, an impression shot through with a surprising vein of lust; it had been a very long time. Anyway, you had to have reservations about somebody who walked around with her shoes untied.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “He was only a cat.”

“Not at all.”

“It’s just, I lost my husband very recently. And Ramon was really his cat.”

“I see.”

“They were very close.”

“I understand,” my grandfather said. “I lost my wife.”

“Recently?”

“Fourteen years.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”

Sally Sichel started to cry. Standing there in her pajamas, arms crossed under her commendable breasts. Looking out at the Jungle that had taken her husband’s cat, the architecture of her cheeks glazed with tears. Her nose began to run. My grandfather took a chamois, which he used to wipe his camera lenses, out of the back pocket of his shorts and passed it to her.

“Oh,” she said, blowing her nose into the chamois. He remembered—as much in his loins as in his head or heart—the circus girl who had spread her legs for him in the cottage at Greenwich Yard, Creasey’s bloody chamois clutched in her hand. “What a gentleman. Thank you.”

He knew that it would also be gentlemanly to put a consolatory arm around Sally Sichel’s shoulder. Not just gentlemanly; it would be humane. But he was afraid of what might happen down the line. A widow and a widower, easing each other’s passage from grief to passion in the autumn of their lives: The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.

From the time he’d moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot. While he turned out the beautiful and high-priced scale models that NASA and private collectors had commissioned, and explored the labyrinth of LAV One as it grew in intricacy and size on the dining room table, the available women of Fontana Village came to make their case. They sent scouts and embassies, plates of cookies and brownies and blondies, pots of soup, potato latkes at Hanukkah, cards, knit goods, pies, poems, oil paintings, cuts of meat, bottles of wine, and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I happened to be visiting when the macaroni and cheese showed up, and I thought it made a pretty strong case for its author, who had followed a recipe adapted from Horn & Hardart’s.

As he’d been licking his fork, awash in memories of the Broad Street Automat, I’d thought my grandfather had looked more contented than I’d seen him in a long time. When the dish was empty, however, he had washed it out and dried it, dropped in a thank-you note scrawled on a scrap of legal paper, and left it on the woman’s back patio at a moment when he knew she would be out. On a few occasions he had been cornered by some available and exceptionally persistent woman of Fontana Village, and just to get a little peace he had accepted her dinner invitation. More intimate invitations, some tempting, some issued with a frankness he could not help but admire, he had declined.

It was not that he wanted to be celibate. He got ideas. He missed the contact, the skin-on-skin warmth of it. The property manager of Fontana Village, Karen Radwin, had a way of touching your arm or your shoulder when she spoke to you, sometimes he would feel a jolt of current. And yet apart from one night in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in April 1975, my grandfather had kept his hands to himself since my grandmother’s death.

You could say this or you could say that about the why or why not of it, but in the end it came down to this: He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like explaining himself. My grandmother used to complain sometimes about his silences, but only when there were other people around, when people started in with the banter and the repartee and the opinions on Agnew or Sondheim, as if she were embarrassed for his sake because his silence might be taken for disapproval or thickheadedness. Don’t worry about him, she would say, that’s how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth. Then she might put a hand on his knee and insist, reassuring herself maybe as much as whomever they were with at the time, But he is listening. After they had been married fifteen years—around the time I came into the picture—there was nothing he could tell her that she didn’t already know. That was all he wanted: to be known.

He did not put his arm around Sally Sichel. He kept it where it belonged, by his side. Just to make sure, he transferred the socket wrench over to that hand as ballast.

Sally Sichel went to the low rail, put her hands to her mouth, and screamed, “RAMOOOOOOOON!” A yellow bird hiding in the brush nearby startled and took wing. She held the ragged note of the O. Lights came on in the units that overlooked the Jungle; calls were placed to the security office. My grandfather had not heard a woman scream that way—holler might be a more accurate characterization—for a very long time. Sally Sichel hollered for Ramon in precisely the way that a peeved older sister would holler from a stoop on Shunk Street when sent out to call her jackass brother home for supper. After the echo died away, Sally Sichel lowered her hands, stepped back from the wooden rail, and turned to my grandfather. She looked a little sheepish, but not very. With the coming of daylight, he could see the marks of care on her face, the shadows under her eyes, a tautness around her mouth as if she had bitten in to something mealy. A fine-looking woman, all the same.

She folded the chamois in half, smoothed it against the swell of her hip, folded and smoothed it again. She handed it back to my grandfather, and he returned it to the back pocket of his khaki shorts.

“Fucking alligator,” she said. “He should choke on Ramon.”

For that, Sally Sichel got a checkmark.

“Let me look into it,” he said.

Sally Sichel stepped back and gave my grandfather a careful once-over. The opinion she had formed of him now appeared to be in need of emendation. Doubtless she had noted the baggy shorts, the sandals worn over socks, the coral-pink polo shirt appliquéd, as if out of sensitivity to the fate of Ramon, with a leaping fox (or possibly a wolfhound) in place of the usual crocodile. He looked like the retired director of a Zionist summer camp. Now she considered his hair, silver turning to white, straighter and finer than in younger days but still a good head of it. She noted his suntanned, sinewy arms, his broad chest, the shoulders that over the years had borne up under the weight of pianos and other burdens. For some reason—she had not noticed until now—he was carrying a big iron wrench, his fingers flexing restlessly along its shaft as if he were itching to use it.

“Let you ‘look into it’?” She laughed. It might have been a bitter or even a mocking laugh. Or maybe he had just cracked her up. My grandfather had spent his life saying things in earnest that struck people, women in particular, as funny. “What does that mean?”

My grandfather supposed it was a strange thing to have said. A more honest formulation would have been that he intended to see what could be done in the area of kicking an alligator’s ass. But that also would have been a strange thing to say. At best it would have sounded like swagger, at worst like psychopathy. If he failed to kick the alligator’s ass, it would be an idle boast. That was the problem, finally, with saying things, in particular things that were true. Yesterday his doctor had shown him a couple of numbers on a blood panel that looked “a little off,” and said it might be nothing serious or it might be very bad. He wanted my grandfather to see a specialist. He had written down a name and a number on a card. The card was stashed inside the Commentary, keeping company with an unflattering caricature of Hosni Mubarak.

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. A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental kernels of certainty remained: Representative democracy was still the best way to govern a large group of human beings. And when some lady’s dead husband’s cat got eaten by an alligator, a man looked into the matter. Even an old man who wore socks with his sandals and needed to see a specialist because something was off in the numbers that told the story of his blood. A man would see what there was to be done.

“I could research what the proper procedure is with alligators,” my grandfather said. After all, alligators were dealt with every day in a variety of ways. They could be trapped, snared, hit with tranquilizing darts. They could be shot, butchered, skinned, and turned into steak and boots. “I mean, if you like. I realize it won’t be any help to Ramon.”

Sally Sichel started to laugh, but this time she caught that my grandfather wasn’t joking, and her mouth snapped shut. Her cheeks turned bright red, but it was not out of embarrassment, because she looked him straight in the eye. “Why not?” she said.

There was the whirr of an electric cart. My grandfather looked toward the service area. It was Devaughn, the night guard, coming to find out who had been making all that noise. Devaughn was almost as old as the people he was paid to protect. He had been born and raised in the part of Florida that was really Georgia and Alabama. No one was sure if he was white or black—it could have gone either way—and those residents of Fontana Village who were deputized or inspired to ask found that in his presence, their nerve failed them or the relevance of the question dwindled away. He had been taught as a boy to regard the occasional Jewish salesman who passed through his native swamp as belonging to a race of lesser demons, horned and dealing in wonders. His manner toward the residents of Fontana Village was suitably tinged with wariness.

Devaughn listened to the story of Ramon and the alligator, and it was not long before he started shaking his head. At first my grandfather took Devaughn’s head-shaking for an expression of regret, commiseration, or disgust. But it turned out that Devaughn felt there was schooling that needed to be done.

“That is not no alligator,” he said. “Been telling Ms. Radwin almost two years now. I have seen its bowel movements. I know how a alligator bowel movement supposed to look. And I know how a snake bowel movement supposed to look.”

“A snake,” Sally Sichel said. “A snake that can eat a cat or a dog? Does Florida have snakes like that?”

“It’s probably somebody’s pet boa constrictor that escaped,” my grandfather said. Once when I visited him, we had watched a program on channel 12 (the only channel my grandfather watched) about the problem of invasive animal species in the state of Florida. Boas, mynahs, feral pigs, rare aquarium fish had escaped captivity or been deliberately released into the wild, where generally they had done well for themselves. The program had been an hour long, but my grandfather waited in vain for a discussion of what was to be done about the invasive species that was really the cause of the problem. “If it’s a boa constrictor, it could get big enough to eat a pig or a deer.”

Sally Sichel, my grandfather, and Devaughn looked at the Jungle. The idea of a giant snake that could strangle a pig or a deer and then swallow it whole slid cold and coiling through their hearts. Then Devaughn got into his cart and whirred away, back to the security desk in the Village Center. Let the day man worry about giant snakes and crazed old Jewesses wandering out into the weeds at the crack of dawn, hollering when they were supposed to be sleeping.

“Speaking of eating a pig or a deer,” Sally Sichel said, “I could make you some French toast.”

My grandfather looked at his watch and his heart seized. He had forgotten all about the launch. If he left now, drove fast, and didn’t stop, he would probably, with a little luck, just make it in time. He had been planning for months, since the Return to Flight was first announced, to do this trip up to the Kennedy Space Center. He knew the names and ranks of all five members of Discovery’s crew. He could tell you the fields of their graduate and post-graduate work, their mission histories, their hobbies and foibles, their relationships and personal ties to the lost crew members of Challenger. He had followed the investigation into the cause of that disaster acutely, delving into its minutiae. During the visit of mine that had featured such a fine dish of macaroni and cheese, all my grandfather wanted to talk about was O-rings, ceramic-tile heat shielding, and Dr. Richard Feynman—always referred to by full name and title. In Feynman’s relentless common sense, my grandfather saw rare evidence of hope for the world.

For months he had felt that it was not just the shuttle program that would be at stake when Discovery blasted off. It would be an entire vision of the future, shared by all the fading partisans of space flight, for whom the launch held the promise of collective redemption. Now my grandfather understood that his interest in the loss of Challenger and the fate of Discovery, his obsession with the modifications that had been made to its solid rocket booster, or to Commander Rick Hauck’s vintage Corvette, amounted to nothing grander than Sally Sichel’s feeling that she was living only to care for her late husband’s cat. There was nothing collective about it. It was purely personal, a seal to stop his heart against a leak of sorrow. Seen in that light, the whole business struck him as much less interesting.

“I already ate,” he told Sally Sichel. “I really ought to get on the road.”

“That’s why you were up and about. I wondered. Where are you off to?”

My grandfather checked his watch again. Almost ten to seven. The darkness of his predawn kitchen, the hum of the electric clock on the wall, the faucet dripping as he cranked out a brown dollop of meat salad, felt like a long time ago.

“Nowhere,” he said. “Never mind.”

“French toast? Still no French toast. All right. How about a cup of coffee?”

“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”

“I promise I won’t,” said Sally Sichel. “Anyway, I get the feeling trouble is your department.”