Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Von Braun’s gaze lighted on a tall ficus in a pumpkin-shaped terra-cotta pot in the corner opposite him. He moved toward the potted plant with a hitch in his gait. He unzipped the fly of his brown suit trousers and took out his pallid old nozzle. There was a pattering, the first drops of rain hitting a dirt infield, then a fitful sloshing like somebody after a party pouring the dregs of beer bottles onto the lawn. Von Braun groaned and cursed softly to himself in the most scabrous German my grandfather had heard since the war. His own urinary vigor was no longer what it once was, and he felt an automatic pity for von Braun. The Conqueror of the Moon kept at it, and after a minute or two it was clear from the acoustics that he had himself a puddle. He coaxed out another laggard drop or two and then hunched his shoulders to zip himself up.
My grandfather forgot that he was supposed to be trying to keep out of von Braun’s way. When von Braun turned from the ficus tree, he saw my grandfather looking at him over the partition. Von Braun looked more embarrassed, certainly more contrite, than my grandfather would have expected. He felt his long-nurtured hatred of the man begin to waver. After all, how was the case of von Braun different from that of any other man whose greatness was chiefly the fruit of his ambition, that reliable breeder of monsters? Ambitious men from Hercules to Napoleon had stood ankle-deep in slaughter as they reached for the heavens. Meanwhile, there was no getting away from the fact that, thanks to von Braun’s unrelenting ambition, only one nation in the whole of human history had left its flag, not to mention a pair of golf balls, on the Moon.
“Congratulations on the prize,” my grandfather said.
“Thank you,” said von Braun. The wide-eyed look of culpability had already left his face, and now he squinted, studying my grandfather’s face. He might have been wondering if he ought to know it. He might have been trying simply to infer my grandfather’s opinion, in general or just in this instance, of a grown man who urinated into a motel flowerpot. My grandfather suspected that it was the former. “I very much appreciate the honor and support.”
“Oh, I didn’t vote for you,” my grandfather said.
Von Braun blinked and bobbed his big white unkempt head. “Who did you vote for?”
“Myself.”
Von Braun grinned and then asked my grandfather his name.
My grandfather felt his heart rate ascend steeply. Was it possible that von Braun had been told the name of the man who had uncovered the trove of V-2 documents that he’d ordered hidden, taking away one of his bargaining chips with the Allies upon capture? If von Braun should happen to recollect and recognize his name, would he call the police or have my grandfather thrown out of the congress? More to the point: Was this my grandfather’s chance, at last, to finish the job he had laid aside that night in favor of doing his duty? He was fifty-nine years old, and if he was no longer as strong as he had been at twenty-nine or thirty-nine, he was also no longer anywhere near so prone to fury. Since the day of his release from prison, he had never once gone looking for trouble. This turned out to be surprisingly effective as a means of avoiding it.
He told Wernher von Braun his name. It did not appear to ring any bells. It certainly had not come up for discussion, as von Braun observed, nor had it appeared, as far as he could recall, on the ballot.
“I was a write-in candidate,” my grandfather explained.
* * *
The walls of the Space Arts and Spacecrafts section of the exhibition room were hung with large-format color photos taken by attendees of the congress: Rocketdyne engines slashing a bright rip across the blue banner of a Canaveral morning. A crowd of people dressed in gumball colors, all craning their necks in the same direction to gape at something overhead. A slow-shutter telephoto exposure of a full moon rising over Mount Erebus that had been taken, according to its label, by von Braun himself during his trip to Antarctica in 1966. Oil paintings and watercolors of spacewalks, moonscapes, and splashdowns were displayed on easels of gold-painted bamboo. A number of paintings depicted with painstaking realism the unbuilt spacecraft and unvisited worlds that were the stuff of space-fan dreams. A few had been painted by the great Chesley Bonestall, a hero to my grandfather. And there were three tables of models: rockets, space planes, capsules, lunar modules, and rovers, built to a variety of scales from a variety of materials. Von Braun came around a partition from the corporate sponsors area, past a large Bonestall of Earth as seen from the Martian surface, a glowing aquamarine dot against the starry black.
Passing the models table, von Braun took a moment to admire a pair of French rockets, a Véronique and a Centaure, that my grandfather had brought with him to the show. My grandfather was identified as their modeler on little cards in front of them, and he accepted von Braun’s praise for their beauty. Von Braun came over to the demonstration table, where my grandfather was sitting behind the mess he had made. Fanciful bits of plastic in drab grays and whites were scattered across the tablecloth.
“What is all this?” von Braun said.
My grandfather noticed that when von Braun’s eyes strayed across a three-fourths-complete model of the prototype STS, he averted his face with a slight jerk of the head, as if the sight of the space shuttle were painful or loathsome. Von Braun leaned over to take a closer look at the scattered bits of molded plastic. He reached down to pick up an elongated and U-shaped extrusion of gray PVC. There was another beside it, the curve of its U slightly flattened. He fitted the pieces together to form the tapered cylinder of a jet engine’s housing.
“You use commercial model kits?” Von Braun looked back at the two French vehicles on the models table. Like all my grandfather’s hobby work to this point, they had been made, with fine woodworking tools and a Dremel, generally from balsa and maple. Each vane, flap, and fairing was custom-built. “No, surely not.”
“Normally, no,” said my grandfather. “I’m just fooling around; they call it ‘kit bashing.’”
On the way down to the space congress from New York, stopping for gas in Myrtle Beach, my grandfather had spotted a hobby shop. He had stopped to pick up some extra 0000 sandpaper for the STS model, which had been the intended demonstration object until the intervention of fate in the form of a one-night stand, a squash ball, and a coffee cup lid. He had begun the shuttle model shortly after the previous congress. But the turmoil of the past year had taken a toll on his time for model building, along with everything else.
The hobby shop in Myrtle Beach turned out to be having a sale on plastic model kits. Impulsively, thinking I might enjoy them—he was planning to stay at our house in Columbia on his way back to New York City after the congress—he had picked up several kits: a couple of panzers, a Zero, a French Mirage, a Bell Huey, an AMC Matador, and a model of the PT-73 from the old McHale’s Navy television show. He also bought several tubes of Testors glue.
In the hour that had passed since he began his demonstration, he had cut the parts from the sprues of the latticed frames that held them and spread them out—axles, struts, rotors, turret guns, joysticks, the components needed to form the Matador’s bucket seats—to get a sense of them. He had pulled out the pieces needed to build one of the panzers’ hulls and, with the help of an X-Acto knife and glue, configured them into a flattened square structure about the size and shape of a coaster. It was wider by about half an inch than the plastic lid that, having dabbed it with Testors, he now settled onto its smooth upper surface.
“What is it? May I ask?”
My grandfather did not reply. He did not intend to reply. He was relieved to discover, on meeting Wernher von Braun, that his heart was no longer filled with homicide nor his brain with retribution. But he had no desire to converse with the man.
“Some sort of hatch? A launch pad?”
My grandfather heard and recognized—picked up like a beacon—the uncontrollable curiosity that was so often the vice of a solitary dreamer. He fought down the urge to explain his theories of lunar settlement, though the urge to explain was overwhelming in my grandfather, qu
“A satellite!” von Braun guessed. “Some kind of solar cell?”
In the end, in classic Nazi style, Wernher von Braun had committed suicide—or anyway his dream had killed itself, a victim of its own success. The Moon had been abandoned. The Apollo program was dead. Thanks to the relentless obsession of von Braun, in a span of five years a lunar voyage had gone, in public opinion, from wondrous and impossible odyssey to short-haul bus run, from national mandate to the greatest waste of dough that human improvidence had ever conceived. At NASA Braun himself had been first sidelined, along with the Saturn Vs, and then shown the door. All the grandiose mission plans that he’d been hawking for decades, in the books he cowrote with Willy Ley, on The Wonderful World of Disney and in the pages of Collier’s and Life, with all those stunning Bonestall paintings of earthrises and Mars landers and farms rotating in low earth orbit, seemed to have been mislaid in some cultural bottom drawer. Nobody talked anymore about orbital wheels at the Lagrange points, about lunar He3 mines or human settlement of Mars. It was the age of the space shuttle, of flying truck drivers. Like the Saturn V, Von Braun was a dinosaur. My grandfather could not help feeling a certain amount of pity.
“Nuclear reactor,” my grandfather said.
“Are you serious?”
“Just the upper portion. Rest of it will be buried.”
“Buried in what?”
“Lunar surface.”
“It’s a moon base?”
“I just started.”
Von Braun lowered himself, grimacing with pain, until he was at eye level with the table. “What is the scale?” he said. He seemed to have forgotten that only two minutes before, my grandfather had caught him pissing into a potted ficus. He was a past master, after all, in the art of expedient forgetting.
“Dunno, 1:66, maybe?”
“Not large, then.”
“Forty kilowatts ought to be enough at first.”
My grandfather picked through the model parts looking for tiny rectangular bits—mirrors, battery covers, gun-port covers—that he could use to complicate and give realistic texture to the model’s surface. This was precisely the technique Trumbull had used for the models in 2001. The pieces were all the various colors of plastic used in the kits they’d been pillaged from, and none the same color as the plastic lid, but once you had spray-painted them the same matte shade of pale gray, the unit would take on a convincing texture.
“Rankine cycle?” von Braun said. “Like the SNAP-10.”
This supposition was lamentably mistaken, and my grandfather was desperate to explain why the simpler mechanics and greater efficiency of a Stirling engine would be infinitely preferable to the turbine of the SNAP models that von Braun and NASA had been pushing a decade earlier. This time he managed to stick to his resolve, and this time von Braun seemed to get the message. Or maybe he was just tired of crouching. He gripped the edges of the table and pulled himself to his feet. He went back over to the models table and reached out with a finger to stroke the smooth-sanded surface of the Véronique, finished in a glossy shade of cream.
“She is really quite beautiful,” he said. He waited to give my grandfather a chance to agree with or dispute this opinion. My grandfather refrained from observing that it wasn’t too surprising the Véronique had caught von Braun’s eye, since it had been engineered in large degree by France’s own cadre of captured Peenemünders. “Still,” von Braun continued, “Frenchmen in space.” He smiled. “You have to admit, there’s comedy in the notion.”
“Yeah?” my grandfather could not prevent himself from saying. “How do you feel about Jews on the Moon?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I did a little consulting work for the state of Israel,” my grandfather lied wildly. “They’re putting a lot of muscle and money and brainpower into a next-level system, Jericho 2. Lunar orbiters and landers. To build a Jewish settlement on the Moon.”
Von Braun looked momentarily taken aback but recovered himself. Give him credit: Having generated so much of his own in his lifetime, the man knew bullshit when he heard it. “Perfect,” he said. “Just the place for them.”
But that was not the end of the story of magic coffee-cup lid. Later that afternoon the young shuttle engineer from Brooklyn came looking for my grandfather. His attention had been drawn to the Véronique and the Centaure models and he had to agree, the work was exquisite, just as Dr. von Braun had told him. He wondered if my grandfather might be amenable to or interested in building models for NASA, both as part of the research and development process and for purposes of education and display? The pay, he said, would be not half bad.
My grandfather said he would think about it. Then he changed his mind and decided to accept the young engineer’s offer without thinking about it. He said he did too much thinking as it was, and if he got this decision out of the way it would free up his brain to think about something else. The young engineer asked for an example of the kind of thing my grandfather had in mind, thinking-wise. “Jews on the Moon?” my grandfather said.
“Oh yeah, I heard about that,” said the young engineer. “I think the old Nazi motherfucker was totally freaked out.”
My grandfather started to laugh.
“Score one for the Hebes,” said the young engineer.
At that my grandfather laughed long and hard. When he could speak again he thanked the young engineer, wrote down his telephone number, and they agreed to be in touch soon. Over the next fourteen years my grandfather went on to build more than thirty-five models for NASA, of different types and functions, at a variety of scales. The reputation of his work for faithfulness and quality brought him commissions from private collectors all over the world. He had no doubt that the work Wernher von Braun indirectly brought his way had helped him emerge from mourning the loss of my grandmother and of the company and the success that meant so much to him.
34
My grandfather stood on his left foot to pull his jeans on over his right leg and lost his balance. He reached out to steady himself on the edge of her dresser. He missed the dresser and knocked into a floor lamp. The lamp had a chrome stand whose surface reflected just enough ambient light to be visible in the dark bedroom, and he could see that it was falling. It was not yet sunrise. He was trying to be quiet. Meanwhile he was falling, too. He had to choose between breaking his own fall or the lamp’s. He opted for the former, making a second, successful try for the edge of the dresser. The lamp hit the terrazzo floor with a cowbell clang, and there was a blue burst in the dark, the soft pow! of a lightbulb losing its vacuum.
“So when you said you weren’t going to sneak out at dawn anymore,” Sally said. Her voice was coming from somewhere underneath a pillow. “You meant you would still leave, but you would make a lot of noise.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Broom’s in the kitchen.”
He went to fetch the dustpan broom, and when he got back she had gone into the bathroom. He heard the chord of her urine spray resonating against different curvatures of the toilet bowl. It was a sound he had always found comforting. It erased all midnight loneliness. He righted the lamp and swept up the glass, then went to the kitchen to dump the mess in the trash. The trash can was full, so he cinched the bag and carried it out to the bin alongside the house. It took him another minute to track down a sixty-watt bulb. By the time he returned to the bedroom, she was sitting on the made bed, lacing up a pair of duck boots.
“What’s this?”
“You’re going to spend all morning chasing after that fucking snake again?”
“I was just going bac
“And then?”
“And then I was planning to spend all morning chasing after that fucking snake.”
“So today I’m coming with you.”
“I’m meeting Devaughn.”
“Did Devaughn let you stick your thing in his bottom last night?”
He was shocked by the question, or the way she phrased it, or the startling image it rhetorically conveyed, but that was all right. He needed a woman who could deliver him a shock. He conceded that indeed Devaughn had granted him no such liberties.
“Is Devaughn going to make you waffles?”
“That seems unlikely.”
She stopped tying her boot and looked up at him, her eyes saying, I rest my case.
“Fine,” said my grandfather. “But could you please make them for me at my place, on my waffle iron?”
“All right.” She looked surprised, not unpleasantly, and a bit puzzled.
As of this point in their relationship Sally had never been to his place. This was just becoming a bit odd. He knew that the longer he put it off, the more it would begin to seem like he had something to hide.
“What’s so special about your waffle iron?”
“It works better than yours.”
“Is that so?”
“Mine, the iron is better seasoned. The waffles never stick.”
“I see. You’ve seasoned yours very thoroughly, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I imagine there’s an entire procedure.”
“That’s right.”
“A right way and a wrong way.”
“Oh, there’s more than one wrong way.”