* I still hear that raucous voice; I hear a hatbox full of voices. They bubble up from a crack in my brain, dark mutterings, shouts, and low reproaches that fall just short of sense, intruding on my thoughts almost any time I’m alone in a quiet room, working on a task that requires a certain focus—when I’m drawing, cooking, soldering a circuit, assembling a toy. When I’m writing, I never hear the hatbox voices; I hear some other voice.

  * A few days after this my father informed me that, because so many people were sick, he would have to live at the hospital where he worked for a little while; he said they had a special bedroom for busy doctors. A week later he moved out. This was the first of three separations, a series that culminated in my parents’ 1975 divorce. Nine months after my father came home for the first time—a year after the miscarriage—my brother was born.

  * Syriac, a distinct dialect of Aramaic, is the holy language of Syrian rite Christianity; yet another Aramaic dialect, Assyrian, remains the mother tongue of two hundred thousand people scattered across West Asia.

  * It was Sandra Gladfelter. See Canaveral Council of Technical Societies, “1975 Twelfth Space Congress Program” (1975).

  * “The funniest Jew who ever lived,” in my grandfather’s estimation, one of the few points on which he and my father ever agreed. “He just sits in a chair, you laugh.”

  * Underwritten by a charter airline called Saturn Airways, which ceased operations in 1976. Only one further Saturn Medal was awarded, to writer Arthur C. Clarke.

  * Whom the Soviets would have been only too happy to abduct into their own rocket research program, of course, had the U.S. not abducted him first.

  *Uncle Ray died of heart failure in 1985, in Los Angeles, where he had found work as a “billiards consultant” for movies and television. Despite his monocular vision he won the occasional tournament and still hustled games from time to time on the side. I was living in Paris at the time of his death and missed the funeral.

  * The series, alas, was never picked up.

 

 

  Michael Chabon, Moonglow

  (Series: # )

 

 

 

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