Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

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. Josef’s breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his cousin spoke.

“As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging, and leave the bed,” he said. His accent was vaguely German, furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.

“That would be nice,” Sammy said. “You speak good English.”

“Thank you.”

“Where’d you learn it?”

“I prefer not to say.”

“It’s a secret?”

“It is a personal matter.”

“Can you tell me what you were doing in California?” said Sammy. “Or is that confidential information too?”

“I was crossing over from Japan.”

“Japan!” 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 grandmother’s 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 lay—and had lain for some time—the 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 concentration—brow furrowed, breath held—to the development of his brain’s 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 Zharkov’s laboratory on the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers, tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent years, Sammy’s commercial attention had been arrested by the field of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators and cartoonists—Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff—were 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 Sammy’s 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 women’s clothing, the dents in men’s 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 sketchy—but 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.

“Japan!” he said again, reeling at the exotic Caniffian perfume that hung over the name. “What were you doing there?”

“Mostly I was suffering from the intestinal complaint,” Josef Kavalier said. “And I suffer still. Particular in the night.”

Sammy pondered this information for a moment, then moved a little nearer to the wall.

“Tell me, Samuel,” Josef Kavalier said. “How many examples must I have in my portfolio?”

“Not Samuel. Sammy. No, call me Sam.”

“Sam.”

“What portfolio is that?”

“My 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.”

“To show my boss?” Sammy said, sensing in his own confusion the persistent trace of his mother’s handiwork. “What are you talking about?”

“Your mother suggested that you might to help me get a job in the company where you work. I am an artist, like you.”

“An artist.” 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. “My mother told you I was an artist?”

“A commercial artist, yes. For the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company.”

For an instant Sammy cupped the tiny flame this secondhand compliment lit within him. Then he blew it out.

“She was talking through her hat,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“She was full of it.”

“Full of …?”

“I’m 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.”

“Ah.” Josef Kavalier let out another long breath. He still had not moved a muscle. Sammy couldn’t decide if this apparent utter motionlessness was the product of unbearable tension or a marvelous calm. “She wrote a letter to my father,” Josef tried. “I remember she said you create designs of superb new inventions and devices.”

“Guess what?”

“She talked into her hat.”

Sammy sighed, as if to suggest that this was unfortunately the case; a regretful sigh, long-suffering—and 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 clerk’s fingers.

“I’ll try,” 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. Sammy felt sorry for him. “Can I ask you a question?” he said.