Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

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.