Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Want to come in?" she said. "Joe's not here."

"Not really," Sammy said. "Yeah, I know. I saw him."

"You saw him?"

"He came by the apartment to get his things. I guess he woke me up. I guess I had kind of a rough night last night."

"Here," she said, sensing an odd note in his voice. She grabbed an old sweater of her father's from the hat stand, put it around her, and stepped out into the courtyard. It was good to get out into the cold air. She felt some order being restored to her thoughts. "Are you all right?" she said. She noticed that he winced when she touched him, as if his arm or his shoulder were sore. "What's the matter with your arm?"

"Nothing, I hurt it."

"How?"

"Playing football on the beach, how else?"

They sat down on the stone steps, side by side.

"Where is he now?"

"I don't know. He's gone. He left."

"What are you doing here, anyway?" she asked him. "Aren't you supposed to be on a train for Hollywood? Where's Bacon?"

"I told him to go ahead without me," Sammy said.

"Oh?"

He shrugged. "I never really wanted… I don't know. I think I got a little carried away with the whole thing."

That morning, at Penn Station, Sammy had said goodbye to Tracy Bacon, in the compartment that had been reserved for them both aboard the Broadway Limited.

I don't understand," Bacon said. They were awkward and clumsy with each other, in the closeness of the first-class compartment, a couple of men, one so intent on not touching the other, the second devoting each movement and gesture to not being touched, that their careful maintenance of a charged and shifting distance between them had itself been a kind of bleak contact. "You didn't even get arrested. Jimmy's lawyers are going to make the whole thing go away."

Sammy shook his head. They were sitting opposite each other on the twin upholstered banquettes, which they would have, somewhere around Fostoria that night, unfolded into a pair of beds.

"I just can't do it anymore, Bake," Sammy said. "It's just-I don't want to be like this."

"You don't have a choice."

"I think I do."

Bacon had gotten up, then, and crossed the three feet of space between them, and sat down on the banquette beside Sammy.

"I don't believe that," he said, reaching for Sammy's hand. "Something like you and me is not a question of choosing or not choosing. There's nothing you can do about it."

Sammy jerked his hand away. Regardless of what he felt for Bacon, it was not worth the danger, the shame, the risk of arrest and opprobrium. Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.

"Just watch me," he said.

In his haste to exit the compartment before Bacon could see him break down, he had collided with an elderly woman making her way down the corridor, and reopened the nasty cut over his eye.

"I'm glad you're still here," Rosa said now. "Sammy, listen to me. I need help."

"I'll help you. What is it?"

"I think I need to get an abortion."

Sammy lit a cigarette and smoked half of it before he replied. "Joe is the father," he said.

"Yes. Of course."

"And you told him and he said?"

"I didn't tell him. How could I tell him? Last night he tried to kill himself."

"He did?"

"I think he did."

"But Rosa, you know, he's joining the navy, he said."

"Right."

"He's just going to go off and enlist in the navy without knowing that you are pregnant with his baby."

"Also right."

"Even though you've known about this for…"

"Say a week."

"Why didn't you tell him? Really, I mean."

"I was afraid," said Rosa. "Really."

"Afraid that what? No, I know," he said. He sounded almost bitter about it. "That he would just tell you to get the thing. And not want to marry you."

"There you have it."

"And now you-"

"Just couldn't possibly ever, in a million years, tell him."

"Because he would certainly tell you-"

"Right. He wants to go kill them, Sam. I don't think anything I tell him could stop him now."

"So now you have to-"

"As I was trying to explain."

Sammy turned to look at her, his eyes bright, wild with an idea that Rosa grasped at once, in all its depths and particulars, in all the fear and hopelessness on which it fed.

"I get you," he said.

The loser at Lupe Velez was obliged to make his bed in the tunnels, out in the pandemonium of Dog-town. There were eighteen dogs, Alaskan malamutes for the most part, with a few odd Labrador and Greenland huskies and one unreliable skulker that was nearly all wolf. You took a sleeping bag and a blanket and, as often as not, a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, and bedded down in the frozen tunnel where, in spite of the snow floor and snow walls and ceiling of snow, the stench of urine, harness leather, and rancid, seal-greased black husky lip was surprisingly lively. They had started out with twenty-seven dogs, enough for two main teams and a team to spare, but four of them had been torn apart by their fellows out of some complex canine emotion composed of boredom, rivalry, and appalling high spirits; one had fallen into a bottomless hole in the ice; two had come down with something as mysterious as it was swift; one had been shot by the signalman, Gedman, for reasons that remained poorly understood; and Stengel, the true genius among the dogs, had wandered off into the fog one day when no one was looking and never come back. There were twenty-two men. They played poker, Parcheesi, chess, cribbage, hearts, go fish, geography, ghost, Ping-Pong, twenty questions, dime hockey, sock hockey, bottle-cap hockey, contract bridge, checkers, liar's dice, Monopoly, and Uncle Wiggily for cigarettes (they had as little use for money as for shovels and snow). They played to win exemption from the nasty work of chipping away with an ice chisel at the frozen ziggurat that mounted endlessly in the latrines, a pillar of turdsicles and of diarrhea plumes arrested by the cold into fantastic shapes out of Gaudi. Or they played (at chess in Particular) for the treasured prize of reducing one another to little piles of ash and embers. But the winners at Lupe Velez won only the right to sleep in their bunks, warm and dry inside the Antarctic Waldorf, for one more night. It was a stupid, cruel, but at the same time forgiving game, and easy to play. There were always twenty-one winners at Lupe Velez and only one loser, and he had to go lie down with the dogs. Though in theory, given the essentially random and unskilled nature of play, they were all at an equal disadvantage, usually the one bedded down in the chaos and smell of the tunnels at the end of the evening, after a brisk inning of Lupe Velez, was Joe Kavalier. He was in there, tucked right into a crate alongside the dog called Oyster, the night that something went wrong with the Waldorf's stove.

Apart from the pilot Shannenhouse, there was not a man among them past the age of thirty-five (the first day the thermometer dipped below -20°F had occurred on the thirty-fifth birthday of their captain, Walter "Wahoo" Fleer, who marked the occasion by sprinting fifty yards from the Blubberteria to the Mess Hall, clad only in his mukluks), and three of the Seabees, Po, Mitchell, and Madden, were barely out of their teens, which probably went some way to explaining the essentially boyish stupidity of Lupe Velez. They would all be crammed into the Mess Hall, at once hours and weeks into the night, wasting time or doing something that pretended not to be wasting time or, in sober, intense bursts, being absorbed in some unavoidable and urgent business of repair, analysis, planning, or navy discipline, when somebody-often enough Gedman, though anyone could start a round-would call out the name of the star of Mexican Spitfire and Honolulu Lu. Immediately everyone in the room was obliged, according to the rules, to follow suit. Whoever was judged, by general determination of the players, to have uttered the critical words last (unless it was his turn on watch), spent that night (what they called night; it was all night) in Dog-town. If, through duty or good fortune, you chanced not to be in the room at the time, you were exempted. Play, except in the case of extreme tedium, was limited to one round per day. These were the rules of the game. Its origins were obscure, its conduct passionate. But for whatever reason, Joe could not seem to master it.