“I’m sorry. We can stop. You should rest. Rest your voice.”
He made a face, dismissing the suggestion. He was not talking more than he had voice or strength to handle. He was talking more than he believed to be wise or suitable. Since, in his view, he reached the limit of conversational daring at the end of a three-minute jeremiad on the world’s failure to recognize the superiority of the Wankel rotary engine, I didn’t take this admonishment, or self-admonishment, too seriously. I felt like it was, if anything, a tad melodramatic.
“I’m glad you’re talking,” I said. Melodrama was all right with me.
“That’s just why I shouldn’t be.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re too glad.”
“I’m too glad?”
“Too interested.”
“Oh no, I’m bored out of my skull,” I said. “Really, I’m just being polite.”
On the street a crew was topping trees to open a view for somebody higher up the hill. All that afternoon a chainsaw started, stopped, started again. Views in the Oakland hills are graded on a scale of visible bridges from one to five: the San Mateo, the Dumbarton, the Bay, the Golden Gate, and the Richmond. My mother’s living room and bedroom scored a respectable two. From my grandfather’s bed, however, the only visible span was the swag of black coaxial cable strung from a corner of the house to a telephone pole up by the street.
“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.”
“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.”
That raised a smile; or maybe the momzer was back.
“Richard Feynman,” I said. “Doctor Richard Feynman.”
“What about him?”
“All he wanted was to find the answer to the question ‘Why did Challenger explode?’ Right? And that answer was never going to be ‘Because it was all part of God’s plan’ or, I don’t know, ‘Challenger exploded so that some little kid somewhere would get inspired to grow up and become an engineer and invent a safer, more durable propulsion system for spacecraft.’ Or even, like, ‘Because humans and the things they make are prone to failure’ or ‘Shit happens.’ The explanation was always going to be something like ‘Because the weather was too cold, so the O-rings became brittle and failed, and fuel leaked from the fuel tank and ignited, which caused the shuttle to accelerate beyond its intended structural tolerance so that it broke apart.’ 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.”
“It was the solid rocket booster,” my grandfather said. “Not the fuel tank.”
“Right.”
He kept on looking at me without speaking, but whatever had blazed out through the cloud cover was gone. A tear rolled down his cheek, and he turned his face to the window again. I got up and pulled a Kleenex from the box. I started to try to wipe away the tear, but he pushed my hand aside. He took the Kleenex.
“I’m ashamed,” he said.
“Grandpa . . .”
“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.”
He made another face. This one said that what I knew about shame—what my entire generation, with its deployment of confession as a tool for self-aggrandizement, knew about shame—would fit into half a pistachio shell.
“Anyway, it’s a pretty good story,” I said. “You have to admit.”
“Yeah?” He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. “You can have it. I’m giving it to you. After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I’m making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?”
“When the earth’s shadow falls across the Moon.”
“Very significant. I’m sure it’s a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.”
“Kind of trite,” I said.
He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life—his, everyone’s—I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.
“So,” I said. “You went to Nordhausen.”
He shook his head, but he was going to give way. We both knew it.
“Yes, God damn it, I went to Nordhausen,” he said in a tone that sounded more defeated than angry. At that moment I knew—knowing nothing—that it had been the worst place on earth. And a part of my nature that had lain dormant for a long time snapped open like an eye.
I had been raised among quiet people who repressed their emotions. I knew my father to have been “a big talker,” “a bullshit artist,” and (an epithet I remembered hearing my grandfather throw in his face) “a loverboy,” but that was hearsay and, given his record, distinctly an argument in favor of repression. I was aware that in some remote age, my grandmother had been a source of fire, madness, and poetry, but those days were misty legend; one could only infer them from traces in the geological record. In my family, in my lifetime, we preferred to leave the business of feeling, and talking about feeling, to people with nothing better to do.
Youthful rebellion, therefore, had required my wholehearted embrace of poetry, fire, and madness, and of all those—Rimbaud, Patti Smith, Syd Barrett, the girls I went after—who trafficked in them. Long after rebellion cooled, I flew the flag of self-expression. I had emerged into adolescence toward the end of the seventies, that great unbuttoning. As I came into young manhood, the ascendant Recovery Movement was at work normalizing the idea that redemption lay in the sharing of experience and feeling, and that in denial there was something like damnation. Right up to that afternoon at my grandfather’s bedside, prodding him to tell me about Nordhausen and the beefy young blond man, I believed (and for the most part believe still) that silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light. I believed that a secret was like a malignancy and confession a knife, a bright hot beam of radiation that healed as it burned. I believed it was good—this being among the few things that truly did go without saying—to “get it all out.”