The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
“Just another minute, madam,” said Sammy, “and we shall trouble you no more.”
“We have left some valuable antiquities in there,” Julie said, in the same clench-jawed Mr. Peanut accent.
Sammy winked, and the two young men smiled at her with as many of their teeth as they could expose until finally she turned, consigning them all to hell with the eloquent back of her hand, and retreated down the stairs.
Sammy turned to Julie. “So where is Jerry?”
“Beats me.”
“Shit, Julius, we’ve got to get in there. Where is everybody else?”
“Maybe they went with him.”
“Don’t you have a key?”
“Do I live here?”
“Maybe we could get in the window.”
“Five stories up?”
“Damn it!” Sammy gave the door a feeble kick. “It’s past noon and we haven’t drawn a line! Christ.” They would have to go back to the Kramler Building and ask to work at the rutted tables in the offices of Racy Publications, a course that would inevitably bring them within the baleful circumference of George Deasey’s gaze.
Joe was kneeling by the door, running his fingers up and down the jamb, fingering the knob.
“What are you doing, Joe?”
“I could get us in, only I leave behind my tools.”
“What tools?”
“I can pick the locks,” he said. “I was trained to, to what, to get out of things. Boxes. Ropes. Chains.” He stood up and pointed to his chest. “Ausbrecher. Outbreaker. No, what it is? ‘Escape artist.’”
“You are a trained escape artist.”
Joe nodded.
“You.”
“Like Houdini.”
“Meaning you can get out of things,” Sammy said. “So you can get us in?”
“Normally. In, out, it’s only the same thing in the other direction. But sadly, I leaved my tools in the Flat Bush.” He pulled a small penknife from his pocket and began to probe the lock with its thin blade.
“Hold on,” Julie said. “Wait a second, Houdini. Sammy. I don’t think we ought to go breaking in—”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Sammy said.
“You’re right,” Joe said. “We’re in a hurry.” He put the knife away and started back down the stairs. Sammy and Julie went after him.
In the street, Joe pulled himself up onto the newel that topped the right-hand baluster of the front steps, a chipped cement sphere onto which some long-vanished tenant had inked a cruel caricature of the querulous lunar face of the late Mr. Waczukowski. He pulled off his jacket and threw it to Sammy.
“Joe, what are you doing?”
Joe didn’t answer. He perched for a moment atop the pop-eyed newel, his long feet side by side in their rubber-soled oxfords, and studied the retractable iron ladder of the fire escape. He pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and cupped a match. He let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, then fit the cigarette between his teeth and rubbed his hands together. Then he sprang from the top of Mr. Waczukowski’s head, reaching out. The fire escape rang against the impact of his palms, and the ladder sagged and with a rusted groan slid slowly downward, six woozy inches, a foot, a foot and a half, before jamming, leaving Joe to dangle five feet off the pavement. Joe chinned himself, trying to loosen it, and swung his legs back and forth; but it stayed latched.
“Come on, Joe,” said Sammy. “That won’t work.”
“You’ll break your neck,” said Julie.
Joe let go of the ladder with his right hand, snatched a puff from his cigarette, then replaced it. Then he took hold of the ladder again and swung himself, throwing his entire body into it, with each swing describing an increasingly wider arc. The ladder rattled and chimed against the fire escape. Suddenly he folded himself in half, let go of the ladder completely, and allowed his momentum to jackknife him out, up and over, onto the bottom platform of the fire escape, where he landed on his feet. It was a completely gratuitous performance, done purely for effect or for the thrill of it; he easily could have pulled himself up the ladder hand over hand. He easily could have broken his neck. He paused for a moment on the landing, flicking ash from the end of his cigarette.
At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon. The windows of the old red row house pooled with light, then spilled over. Lit thus from behind by a brimming window, Josef Kavalier seemed to shine, to incandesce.
“Look at him,” said Sammy. “Look what he can do.”
Over the years, reminiscing for friends or journalists or, still later, the reverent editors of fan magazines, Sammy would devise and relate all manner of origin stories, fanciful and mundane and often conflicting, but it was out of a conjunction of desire, the buried memory of his father, and the chance illumination of a row-house window, that the Escapist was born. As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing—common enough among the inventors of heroes—to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.
At the same time, as he watched the reckless exercise of Joe’s long, cavalier frame, the display of strength for its own sake and for the love of display, the stirring of passion was inevitably shadowed, or fed, or entwined by the memory of his father. We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.
“Remarkable,” Julie said dryly, in a voice that suggested there was something funny, and not in the sense of humorous, about the expression on his old friend’s face. “Now if only he could draw.”
“He can draw,” said Sammy.
Joe ran clanking up the steps of the fire escape to the fourth-floor window, threw up the sash, and fell headfirst into the room. A moment later there was an impossibly musical Fay Wray scream from the apartment.
“Huh,” Julie said. “The guy might do all right in the cartoon business.”
6
A GIRL WITH WILD BROWN RINGLETS, looking like she was going to cry, came barreling into the stairwell. She was wearing a man’s herringbone overcoat. Joe stood in the middle of the apartment, his head hung at a comically sheepish angle, rubbing at the back of his neck. Sammy just had time to notice that the girl was carrying a pair of black engineer boots in one hand and a knot of black hose in the other before she brushed past Julie Glovsky, almost sending him over the banister, and went thumping bare-legged down the stairs. In her immediate wake, the three young men stood there looking at one another, stunned, like cynics in the wake of an irrefutable miracle.
“Who was that?” Sammy said, stroking his cheek where she had brushed against him with her perfume and her alpaca scarf. “I think she might have been beautiful.”
“She was.” Joe went to a battered horsehide chair and picked up a large satchel lying on it. “I think she forgot this.” It was black leather, with heavy black straps and complicated clasps of black metal. “Her purse.”
“That isn’t a purse,” said Julie, looking nervously around the living room, reckoning up the damage they had already done. He scowled at Sammy as if sensing another one of his friend’s harebrained schemes already beginning to fall apart. “That’s probably my brother’s. You’d better put it down.”
“Is Jerry transporting secret documents all of a sudden?” Sammy took the bag from Joe. “Suddenly he’s Peter Lorre?” He undid the clasps and lifted the heavy flap.
“No!” said Joe. He lunged to snatch the bag, but Sammy yanked it away. “It’s not nice,” Joe chided him, trying to reach around and grab it. “We should respect her privacies.”
“This couldn’t be hers,” said Sammy. And yet he found in the black courier’s pouch a pricey-looking tortoiseshell compact, a much-folded pamphlet entitled “Why Modern Ceramics Is the People’s Art,” a lipstick (Helena Rubinstein’s Andalucia), an enameled gold pillbox, and a wallet with two twenties and a ten. Several calling cards in her wallet gave her name, somewhat extravagantly, as Rosa Luxemburg Saks, and reported that she was employed in the art department at Life magazine.
“I don’t think she was wearing any panties,” said Sammy.
Julie was too moved by this revelation to speak.
“She wasn’t,” said Joe. They looked at him. “I came in through the window and she was sleeping there.” He pointed to Jerry’s bedroom. “In the bed. You heard her scream, yes? She put on her dress and her coat.”
“You saw her,” said Julie.
“Yes.”
“She was naked.”
“Quite naked.”
“I’ll bet you couldn’t draw it.” Julie pulled off his sweater. It was the color of Wheatena, and underneath it he wore another, identical sweater. Julie was always complaining that he felt cold, even in warm weather; in the wintertime he went around swelled to twice his normal bulk. Over the years, his mother, based only on knowledge gleaned from the pages of the Yiddish newspapers, had diagnosed him with several acute and chronic illnesses. Every morning she obliged him to swallow a variety of pills and tablets, eat a raw onion, and take a teaspoon each of Castoria and vitamin tonic. Julie himself was a great perpetrator of nudes, and was widely admired in Sammy’s neighborhood for his unclothed renditions of Fritzi Ritz, Blondie Bumstead, and Daisy Mae, which he sold for a dime, or, for a quarter, of Dale Arden, whose lovely pubic display he rendered in luxuriant strokes generally agreed to be precisely those with which Alex Raymond himself would have endowed her, if public morals and the exigencies of interplanetary travel had permitted it.
“Of course I could draw it,” said Joe. “But I would not.”
“I’ll give you a dollar if you draw me a picture of Rosa Saks lying naked in bed,” said Julie.
Joe took Rosa’s satchel from Sammy and sat down on the horsehide chair. He seemed to be balancing his material need against the desire he felt, as had Sammy, to hold on to a marvelous apparition and keep it for his own. At last he sighed and tossed the satchel to one side.
“Three dollars,” he said.
Julie was not happy with this, but nonetheless he nodded. He pulled off another sweater. “Make it good,” he said.
Joe knelt to grab a broken stub of Conte crayon lying on an overturned milk crate at his feet. He picked up an unopened overdue notice from the New York Public Library and pressed it flat against the milk crate. The long forefingers of his right hand, stained yellow at their tips, skated leisurely across the back of the envelope. His features grew animated, even comical: he squinted, pursed his lips and shifted them from side to side, grimaced. After a few minutes, and as abruptly as it had begun, his hand came to a stop, and his fingers kicked the crayon loose. He held up the envelope, wrinkling his forehead, as if considering the thing he had drawn and not simply the way he had drawn it. His expression grew soft and regretful. It was not too late, he seemed to be thinking, to tear up the envelope and keep the pretty vision all to himself. Then his face resumed its habitual mien, sleepy, unconcerned. He passed the envelope to Julie.
His short flight through the window had landed him on the floor of the bedroom, and Joe had chosen to draw Rosa Saks the way he’d first seen her, at eye level as he picked himself up from the floor, looking past a carved acorn that crowned the footboard of the bed. She was lying passed out on her belly, her sprawling right leg kicked free of the blankets and leaving exposed rather more than half of a big and fetching tuchis. Her right foot loomed large in the foreground, slender, toes curled. The lines of her bare and of her blanketed leg converged, at the ultimate vanishing point, in a coarse black bramble of shadow. In the distance of the picture, the hollows and long central valley of her back rose to a charcoal Niagara of hair that obscured all but the lower portion of her face, her lips parted, her jaw wide and perhaps a bit heavy. It was a four-by-nine-inch slice cut fresh from Joe’s memory but, for all its immediacy, rendered in clean, unhurried lines, with a precision at once anatomical and emotional: you felt Joe’s tenderness toward that curled little foot, that hollow back, that open, dreaming mouth drawing a last deep breath of unconsciousness. You wanted her to be able to go on sleeping, as long as you could watch.
“You didn’t show her boobs!” said Julie.
“Not for three dollars,” said Joe.
With grumbling and a great show of reluctance, Julie paid Joe off, then slid the envelope into the hip pocket of his overcoat, wedging it protectively into a copy of Planet Stories. When, fifty-three years later, he died, the drawing of Rosa Saks naked and asleep was found among his effects, in a Barracini’s candy box, with a souvenir yarmulke from his eldest son’s bar mitzvah and a Norman Thomas button, and was erroneously exhibited, in a retrospective at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, as the work of the young Julius Glovsky. As for Common Errors in Perspective Drawing, the overdue library book, recent inquiries have revealed that it was returned, under a citywide amnesty program, in 1971.
7
IN THE IMMEMORIAL STYLE of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. They took their shoes off, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and loosened their neckties. They moved ashtrays around, swept stacks of magazines to the floor, put a record on, and generally acted as if they owned the place. They were in the room where the boy-genius artists kept their drawing tables and taborets, a room variously referred to by its occupants over the years as the Bullpen, the Pit, the Rathole, and Palooka Studios, the latter a name often applied to the entire apartment, to the building, occasionally to the neighborhood, and even, on grim, hungover, hacking mornings with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash, to the whole damn stinking world. At some time in the last century, it had been an elegant lady’s bedroom. There were still curvy brass gas fixtures and egg-and-dart moldings, but most of the moss-green moiré paper had been ripped down for drawing stock, leaving the walls covered only by a vast brown web of crazed glue. But in truth, Sammy and Joe scarcely took note of their surroundings. It was just the clearing in which they had come to pitch the tent of their imaginations. Sammy lay down on a spavined purple davenport; Joe, on the floor, was aware for a moment that he was lying on a sour-smelling oval braided rug, in an apartment recently vacated by a girl who had impressed him, in the few instants of their acquaintance, as the most beautiful he had ever seen in his life, in a building whose face he had scaled so that he could begin to produce comic books for a company that sold farting pillows, in Manhattan, New York, where he had come by way of Lithuania, Siberia, and Japan. Then a toilet flushed elsewhere in the apartment, and Sammy peeled his socks off with a happy sigh, and Joe’s sense of the present strangeness of his life, of the yawning gap, the long, unretraceable path that separated him from his family, receded from his mind.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay—whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four-color dots of the lithographer—lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk. Carefully, with a certain rueful humor inspired in part by self-consciousness at his broken grammar, Joe told the story of his interrupted studies with the Ausbrecher Bernard Kornblum, and described the role his old teacher had played in his departure from Prague. He told Sammy merely that he had been smuggled out in a shipment of unspecified artifacts that Sammy pictured aloud as big Hebrew grimoires locked with golden clasps. Joe did not disabuse him of this picture. He was embarrassed now that, when asked for a lithe aerial Superman, he had drawn a stolid golem in a Phrygian cap, and felt that the less said from now on about golems, the better. Sammy was keen on the details of autoliberation, and full of questions. Was it true that you had to be double-jointed, that Houdini was a prodigy of reversible elbow and knee sockets? No, and no. Was it true that Houdini could dislocate his shoulders at will? According to Kornblum, no. Was it more important in the trade to be strong or dexterous? It required more finesse than dexterity, more endurance than strength. Did you generally cut, pick, or rig a way out? All three and more—you pried, you wriggled, you hacked, you kicked. Joe remembered some of the things Kornblum had told him of his career in show business, the hard conditions, the endless travel, the camaraderie of performers, the painstaking and ongoing transmission among magicians and illusionists of accumulated lore.
“My father was in vaudeville,” Sammy said. “Show business.”
“I know. I have heard from my father one time. He was a strong man, yes? He was very strong.”
“He was the World’s Strongest Jew,” Sammy said.
“He is now …”
“He is now dead.”
“I am sorry.”
“He was a bastard,” Sammy said.
“Oh.”
“Not literally. That’s just an expression. He was a schmuck. He left when I was a little kid and never came back.”
“Ah.”
“He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent.”
“Is that why you don’t want our guy”—he had adopted Sammy’s term—“to be strong?”
“No! I just don’t want our guy to be the same as everybody else’s, you know?”
“My mistake,” said Joe. He sensed, however, that he was right. He could hear the admiration in Sammy’s voice even as he pronounced the late Mr. Klayman a bastard.
“What’s your father like?” Sammy said.
“He is a good man. He is a doctor. He is not the most strongest Jew in the world, sadly.”
“That’s what they need over there,” Sammy said. “Or, look at you, you got out. Maybe what they need is like a super-Kornblum. Hey.” He stood up and began to pound his right hand into the palm of his left. “Ooh. Ooh, ooh. Okay. Hold on a minute.” Now he pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. Joe sat up. He ran his mind back over the last half hour of conversation and, as if he were picking up a transmission direct from Sammy’s brain, saw in his own mind the outlines, the dark contours, the balletic contortions, of a costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape.* He was just envisioning or foretasting or, strangely, remembering this dashing character when Sammy opened his eyes. His face was twisted and flushed with excitement. He looked very much as if, to employ one of his own expressions, his bowels were in an uproar.
“Okay,” he said, “listen to this.” He started to pace between the drawing tables, looking down at his feet, declaiming in a sharp, barking tenor that Joe recognized from the announcers on American radio. “To, uh, to all those who, uh, toil in the bonds of slavery—”
“Bonds?”
“Yeah.” Sammy’s cheeks reddened, and he dropped the radio voice. “Chains, like. Just listen. It’s comics, all right?”
“All right.”
He resumed his pacing and radio-announcer tone and continued to compose his historic series of exclamations.
“To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!” His delivery grew more assured now. “Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! He is”—he paused and threw Joe a helpless, gleeful glance, on the point of vanishing completely into his story now—“the Escapist!”
“‘The Escapist.’” Joe tried it out. It sounded magnificent to his un-schooled ear—someone trustworthy and useful and strong. “He is an escape artist in a costume. Who fights crime.”
“He doesn’t just fight it. He frees the world of it. He frees people, see? He comes in the darkest hour. He watches from the shadows. Guided only by the light from—the light from—”
“His Golden Key.”
“That’s great!”
“I see,” Joe said. The costume would be dark, dark blue, midnight blue, simple, functional, ornamented only with a skeleton-key emblem on the chest. Joe went over to one of the drawing tables and climbed onto the stool. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and started to sketch rapidly, closing his inner eyelid and projecting against it, so to speak, the image of a lithe, acrobatic man who had just leaped into his mind, a man in the act of alighting, a gymnast dismounting the rings, his right heel about to meet the ground, his left leg raised and flexed at the knee, his arms thrown high, hands outspread, trying to get at the physics of the way a man moved, the give-and-take of sinews and muscle groups, to forge, in a way that no comic book artist yet had, an anatomical basis for grace and style.
“Wow,” Sammy said. “Wow, Joe. That’s good. That’s beautiful.”
“He is here to free the world,” said Joe.
“Exactly.”
“Permit me to ask a question to you.”
“Ask me anything. I got it all up here.” Sammy tapped his head in a cocky manner that reminded Joe almost painfully of Thomas; in the next minute, when Sammy heard Joe’s question, he looked crestfallen in exactly the same way.
“What is the why?” said Joe.
Sammy nodded slowly, then stopped.
“The why,” he said. “Shit.”
“You said—”
“I know, I know. I know what I said. All right.” He picked up his coat and grabbed the last package of cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
* The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death—of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats—is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.
8
THE CURTAIN ITSELF is legendary: its dimensions, its weight, its darker-than-chocolate color, the Continental fineness of its stuff. It hangs in thick ripples like frosting poured from the proscenium arch of the most famous theater in the most celebrated block of the world’s greatest city. Call it Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world; and home also of the Empire Palace Theatre, whose fabled Black Curtain trembles now as, at stage right, the narrowest of fissures opens in the rich dark impasto of its velour. Through this narrow gap a boy peers out. His face, ordinarily a trusting blank surmounted by tousled yellow curls, is creased with worry. He is not measuring the numbers of the audience—the house is sold out, as it has been for every night of the current engagement. He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person or thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.