Moonglow. Michael Chabon

Чтение книги онлайн.

      1 Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel by Willy Ley (3rd edition, Viking, 1957), a history of rocket flight up to 1956, combined with a detailed if ultimately mistaken prognostication of a manned mission to the Moon. I knew the book and its author were longtime favorites of my grandfather, but I had never seen this particular copy. It lacked a dust jacket and bore clear evidence—tape stains, a tear on the pastedown where a pocket for the date card had been, new york state dept. of corrections rubber-stamped along the top edge—of its provenance. When I flipped through its pages, I noticed that throughout the book, someone—presumably my grandfather—had used a black marker to blot out certain words. I held up the defaced pages to the bedside lamp. Every blot covered an occurrence of one man’s name: Wernher von Braun.*

      2 A Zippo, known as “Aughenbaugh’s lighter,” which he had carried in his right pants pocket for as long as I could remember. He had quit smoking before I was born, but I’d seen him use Aughenbaugh’s lighter many times to light charcoal grills, chimney logs, campfires. On a smooth oval, set into a nickel finish otherwise pebbled to hide scratches, you could make out traces of an engraved representation of an organic molecule, a linked pair of hexagons whose vertices were Cs, Hs, and Os. Over the years I had asked him a few times what molecule was represented, but the answer I received (“Maltose”), or the reason for the answer (“Because it makes donuts taste good”) struck me as so nonsensical and seemed to explain so little—my grandfather didn’t even like donuts—that I finally concluded he was putting me on. As for the Zippo’s eponym, my grandfather would only say that Aughenbaugh had been an Army buddy.

      3 A black-and-white photograph of my mother, taken in August 1958. In the photo she was sitting bareback on a lean gray horse. She wore a beach towel around her hips and a one-piece swimsuit that she filled out more thoroughly than might be advisable for a girl not yet sixteen. She and the horse were angled away from the photographer, looking to his left. My mother held an archery bow with an arrow nocked to the drawn bowstring, ready to let fly at a target out of the frame. I had never seen the photo before it showed up among my grandfather’s belongings. Neither he nor my mother would say much about it except that it had been taken at a hotel in Virginia Beach during the period of her life when she was remanded to the custody of Uncle Ray. My mother’s hair was unkempt, and the look in her eyes, taking aim, struck me as murderous.

      4 A model “moon garden,” constructed from the lid of a to-go coffee cup, pieces salvaged from commercial model airplane and tank kits, a dozen small capacitors and four links of a metal wristwatch band, glued together and spray-painted Tamiya “Light Ghost Grey.” It belonged to LAV One, my grandfather’s scale-model lunar outpost, which he had spent the years since my grandmother’s death building and reconfiguring. With its tunnels, pods, aerials, dishes, and domes, the LAV One model on its craggy scale-model lunar surface covered most of the dining room table in his condo back in Florida. “He only wanted the Moon garden,” my mother told me. “I had to kind of tweeze it out from the rest of it.”

      5 A publicity photograph, in a Lucite box frame, of the last crew of the space shuttle Challenger. In this photograph astronauts Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair sat at a table with their helmets in front of them like fishbowls from which they planned to draw lucky numbers. Behind them stood Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, cradling their helmets in their hands. The crew’s flight suits, like the shiny cloth that covered the table, were a variation on the blue of the Florida sky in which they would soon be lost. Their seven smiles mocked them, at least to my eye. At one end of the blue table, like a human skull in a still life, stood a scale model of Challenger strapped to its fuel tank and booster rockets. In the photograph, the model shuttle looked like a child’s toy, albeit a splendid one. It was hard to see the fine detail that my grandfather had put into this particular commission, how the cargo bay doors opened to reveal the remote manipulator arm, how the engine nozzles could be made to pivot. You could pull open the nose of the fuselage and look into the crew cabin, rendered in faithful detail down to the buttons and switches of the instrument panels and the “Sally Ride curtain” over the toilet.