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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Michael Chabon
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PART I
The ESCAPE ARTIST
1
IN LATER YEARS, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalierâs greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. âTo me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,â he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or AngoulĂȘme or to the editor of The Comics Journal. âYou werenât the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdiniâs first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called âMetamorphosis.â It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.â The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his roleâof the role of his own imaginationâin the Escapistâs birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Houdini was a hero to little men, city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be, like many optimists, a little excitable. He was not, in any conventional way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells, which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television, atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambitionâone of a thousandâof ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe, Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert passionâone of them, at any rateâwas for those two-bit argosies of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clayâand the true history of the Escapistâs birthâbegan in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammyâs mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like a question mark against the door frame, a disheveled pile of newspapers pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emilâs son, who had arrived in New York tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
âWhatâs the matter with him?â Sammy said. He slid over until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take both of the pillows with him. âIs he sick?â
âWhat do you think?â said his mother, slapping now at the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings. âHe can barely stand on his own two feet.â
Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor Josef Kavalier in his baggy tweed suit. He had known, dimly, that he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammyâs bed. He wasnât sure just how San Francisco fitted into the story.
âThere you are,â his mother said, standing up straight again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost five inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. âCome here. I want to tell you something.â She grabbed hold of his ears as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his cheeks in turn with her lips. âYou made it. All right? Youâre here.â
âAll right,â said her nephew. He did not sound convinced.
She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness. Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out. The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy thud of defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit, damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy presently identified as the smell, on his cousinâs breath, of prunes from the leftover ingot of his motherâs âspecialâ meatloafâprunes were only a small part of what made it so very specialâwhich he had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and had said nothing about it to Sammy.
Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly. Josefâs breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin spoke.
âAs soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed,â he said. His accent was vaguely German, furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.
âThat would be nice,â Sammy said. âYou speak good English.â
âThank you.â
âWhereâd you learn it?â
âI prefer not to say.â
âItâs a secret?â
âIt is a personal matter.â
âCan you tell me what you were doing in California?â said Sammy. âOr is that confidential information too?â
âI was crossing over from Japan.â
âJapan!â Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing more treacherous than that of the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his grandmotherâs snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In his desk drawer layâand had lain for some timeâthe first eleven pages of a massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either (in the Perelmanian mode) Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian) American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours of mute concentrationâbrow furrowed, breath heldâto the development of his brainâs latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And he had thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters, ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around the attainment of fabulous sums of money.
From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants, cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkovâs laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammyâs commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonistsâRockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniffâwere at their zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammyâs closet were stacked dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians, football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos, Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in womenâs clothing, the dents in menâs hats, the lights in human irises, clouds in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchyâbut he was an enterprising thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel of the Planets and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.
âJapan!â he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. âWhat were you doing there?â
âMostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint,â Josef Kavalier said. âAnd I suffer still. Particular in the night.â
Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.
âTell me, Samuel,â Josef Kavalier said. âHow many examples must I have in my portfolio?â
âNot Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam.â
âSam.â
âWhat portfolio is that?â
âMy portfolio of drawings. To show your employer. Sadly, I am obligated to leave behind all of my work in Prague, but I can very quickly do much more that will be frightfully good.â
âTo show my boss?â Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his motherâs handiwork. âWhat are you talking about?â
âYour mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist, like you.â
âAn artist.â Again Sammy envied his cousin. This was a statement he himself would never have been able to utter without lowering his fraudulent gaze to his shoe tops. âMy mother told you I was an artist?â
âA commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company.â
For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.
âShe was talking through her hat,â he said.
âSorry?â
âShe was full of it.â
âFull of âŠ?â
âIâm an inventory clerk. Sometimes they let me do pasteup for an ad. Or when they add a new item to the line, I get to do the illustration. For that, they pay me two dollars per.â
âAh.â Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldnât decide if this apparent utter motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. âShe wrote a letter to my father,â Josef tried. âI remember she said you create designs of superb new inventions and devices.â
âGuess what?â
âShe talked into her hat.â
Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-sufferingâand false. No doubt his mother, writing to her brother in Prague, had believed that she was making an accurate report; it was Sammy who had been talking through his hat for the last year, embroidering, not only for her benefit but to anyone who would listen, the menial nature of his position at Empire Novelties. Sammy was briefly embarrassed, not so much at being caught out and having to confess his lowly status to his cousin, as at this evidence of a flaw in the omniveillant maternal loupe. Then he wondered if his mother, far from being hoodwinked by his boasting, had not in fact been counting on his having grossly exaggerated the degree of his influence over Sheldon Anapol, the owner of Empire Novelties. If he were to keep up the pretense to which he had devoted so much wind and invention, then he was all but obliged to come home from work tomorrow night clutching a job for Josef Kavalier in his grubby little stock clerkâs fingers.
âIâll try,â he said, and it was then that he felt the first spark, the tickling finger of possibility along his spine. For another long while, neither of them spoke. This time, Sammy could feel that Josef was still awake, could almost hear the capillary trickle of doubt seeping in, weighing the kid down. ...