Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Jerry turned to Marty. “He’s employing sarcasm.”

“I noticed that.”

“I’m not sure I could take being bossed around by this wiseass. I’ve been having problems with this wiseass for years.”

“I can see how you might.”

“If Tokyo Joe, here, will ink me,” said Frank Pantaleone, “I’m in.” Joe nodded his assent. “Then I’m in. Fra—To tell you the truth, I’ve been having a few ideas in this direction, anyway.”

“Will you lend one to me?” said Davy. Frank shrugged. “Then I’m in, too.”

“All right, all right,” said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. “You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway.” He started back down the stairs. “I’ll make us some coffee.” He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. “But stay away from my food. That’s my chicken.”

“And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.

“And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.

“We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”

“Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.

“Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.

FOR TWO DAYS, none of them slept. They drank Jerry’s coffee until it was gone, then brought up cardboard trays of sour black stuff from the all-night Greek on Eighth Avenue, in blue-and-white paper cups. As promised, Jerry was cruel in his administration of the chicken, but another half was fetched, along with bags of sandwiches, hot dogs, apples, and doughnuts; they cleared the hospital-pantry of three cans of sardines, a can of spinach, a box of Wheaties, four bouillon cubes, and some old prunes. Joe’s appetite was still stranded somewhere east of Kobe, but Sammy bought a loaf of bread that Joe spread with butter and devoured over the course of the weekend. They went through four cartons of cigarettes. They blared the radio, when the stations signed off they played records, and in the quiet moments between they drove one another mad with their humming. Those who had girlfriends broke dates.

It became clear fairly quickly that Sammy, deprived of his bible of clipped panels and swiped poses, was the least talented artist in the group. Within twelve hours of commencing his career as a comic book artist, he retired. He told Joe to go ahead and lay out the rest of the artwork for the Escapist story by himself, guided, if he needed a guide, by some of the issues of Action and Detective and Wonder that littered the floor of the Pit. Joe picked up a copy of Detective and began to leaf through it.

“So the idea for me is to draw very badly like these fellows.”

“These guys aren’t trying to draw bad, Joe. Some of what they do is okay. There’s a guy, Craig Flessel, he’s really pretty good. Try to keep an open mind. Look at this.” Sammy grabbed a copy of Action and opened it to a page where Joe Shuster showed Superman freeing Lois Lane from the grasp of some big-shouldered crooks—war profiteers, as Sammy recalled. The backgrounds were reduced to their essence, hieroglyphs signifying laboratory, log cabin, craggy mountaintop. The chins were jutting, the musculature conventionalized, Lois’s eyes plumed slits. “It’s simple. It’s stripped down. If you sat there and filled every panel with all your little bats and puddles and stained-glass windows, and drew in every muscle and every little tooth and based it on Michelangelo and cut your own ear off over it, that would be bad. The main thing is, you use pictures to tell a good story.”

“The stories are good?”

“Sometimes the stories are good. Our story is really fucking good, if I do say so myself.”

“Fucking,” Joe said, letting it out slowly like a satisfying drag.

“Fucking what?”

Joe shrugged. “I was just saying it.”

Sammy’s real talents, it developed, lay elsewhere than in the pencil or brush. This became clear to everyone after Davy O’Dowd returned to the Pit from a brief conference with Frank over ideas for Davy’s character. Frank was already wrapped up in his own idea, or lack thereof, working at the kitchen table and, in spite of his promise to Davy, could not be bothered. Davy came in from the kitchen scratching his head.

“My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. “That I know.”

Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.

“Oy,” he said.

“What?”

“He flies, huh?”

“Something wrong with that? Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”

“Huh?”

“Wishful figments. You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”

“Huh.” Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.

“I always wished I could fly,” Davy said. “I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”

“It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”

“It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.

“All right, then, so he can fly.” Sammy looked at Joe. “Joe?”

Joe glanced up briefly from his work. “Why.”

“Why?”

Sammy nodded. “Why can he fly? Why does he want to? And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime? Why doesn’t he just become the world’s best second-story man?”

Davy rolled his eyes. “What is this, comic book catechism? I don’t know.”

“Take one thing at a time. How does he do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stop saying you don’t know.”

“He has big wings.”

“Think of something else. A rocket pack? Antigravity boots? An autogyro hat? Mythological powers of the winds? Interstellar dust? Blood transfusion from a bee? Hydrogen in his veins?”

“Slow down, slow down,” Davy said. “Jesus, Sam.”

“I’m good at this shit. Are you scared?”

“Just embarrassed for you.”

“Take a number. Okay, it’s a fluid. An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him.”

“He does.”

“Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see? The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit. He’s a scientist. A doctor. He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood. For the battlefield, you know. Synth-O-Blood, it’s called. Maybe it’s, shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. Because blood is iron-based. Whatever. But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it. When he won’t let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead. It’s too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies. I mean, he does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink. And when he comes to—”

“He can fly!” Davy looked happily around the room.

“He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace. But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he’s a dead man. He can never stop being … being …” Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.

“Almost Dead Flying Guy,” suggested Jerry.

“Blood Man,” said Julie.

“The Swift,” Marty Gold said. “Fastest bird in the world.”

“I draw really nice wings,” said Davy O’Dowd. “Nice and feathery.”