Moonglow

"How are you?" Mrs Outcault said very loudly.
Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat hanger of God.
"Sign language," Mrs. Outcault explained. "Poor thing's deaf as a boot. I heard he was struck by lightning, though I can't say for sure."
With his long pallid fingers and his nails manicured to a moonlike luster, Mr. Casamonaca continued to draw things across the space between him and my mother. The regular rippling of a corrugated roof. The outline of a jellyfish. The downward spiral of water in a toilet bowl.
Mrs. Outcault nodded emphatically. "Oh yes," she said. "I know. You're so right."
"What's he saying?"
"I have no idea," Mrs. Outcault said through a tight smile. She kept on nodding. "It isn't real sign language at all. Just something he made up. He never learned to speak English very well, and in the past few years he's lost the ability to read and write in Italian."
"He - Then how did he write a play?"
"He dictated it to your mother, which is why she has been so involved in all this. Using those crazy signs of his."
"My mom doesn't know sign language."
"Apparently, she is fluent in Mr. Casamonaca's."
My mother watched Mr. Casamonaca's hands and fingers explain the behavior of skyrockets, the opening of a beer can, and the proper means for setting a golf ball on a tee.
"It looks like he's just making it up as he goes along," she said.
"That is a popular theory," said Mrs. Outcault.

“You think this explains everything,” my grandfather said. He freighted the word explains with as much contempt as it would bear before exiling it from his mouth. “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.”

“You think this explains everything,” my grandfather said. He freighted the word explains with as much contempt as it would bear before exiling it from his mouth. “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.”

What he saw that day, and what he heard from the survivors he questioned, persuaded him that there was no way Werner von Braun could have been technical director of the V-2 program while remaining unaware of how business was conducted in the Mittelwerk. Von Braun could not be crowned with the glory of the rocket without shouldering the burden of its shame. All the suffering my grandfather saw had been amassed and all the cruelty deployed at the prompting and in service to von Braun's dream. It turned out the V-2 was not a means to liberate the human spirit from the chains of gravity; it was only a pretext for further enchainment. It was not an express bound for the stars but a mail rocket carrying one simple message, signed in high-explosive amatol with the name of Baron von Braun. For a time, maybe, its grandeur and its beauty had blinded von Braun to all the ways in which he was busily betraying it. That was only human, the common lot. But once your dream revealed itself, like most dreams, to be nothing but a current of raw compulsion flowing through a circuitry of delusion and lies, then that was the time to give it up. That was the time to damn your dreams and trust your eyes. And maybe cock your revolver.

“What emerged was, in many ways, an authentic memoir – not of my grandfather, but of myself,” he says. “The book is, in some strange way, an autobiography. It’s an autobiography of my imagination, my imaginative life, and an autobiography of my, I don’t know – my psyche.”