Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Well?" she said.

Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, "Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of Seduction of the Innocent." Or, for the thousandth time, with the usual admixture of wonder and hostility: "Your father is quite a character." Or-she dreaded and longed to hear it: "Well, you got him back."

But he just snuffled one last time and said, "I like it."

Rosa sat up a little bit more.

"Really?"

He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. "It's very disturbing," he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. "It's like the Bomb really is the Other Woman."

"The Bomb is sexy."

"That's what's disturbing," Sammy said. "Actually, what's disturbing is that you could think such a thing."

"Look who's talking."

"You gave the Bomb a figure. A womanly shape."

"That comes right out of Tommy's World Book. I didn't make that up."

Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.

"Is he out of his mind?" he said.

"Tommy or Joe?"

"He's been leading a secret life for the last ten years. I mean, but really. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived."

"Who knew?"

"A bunch of those magicians. That's where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen's."

"Louis Tannen's Magic Shop," she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy's attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed. He seems quite obsessed with the place, her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy's own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn't it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? "They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?"

"Misdirection."

"A lie to cover a lie."

"I asked Joe about Orson Welles," Sammy said. "He knew."

She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe's disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides-suffering from "survivor's guilt," as it was called-among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody's ill fate in the hinterlands-the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco-she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)-the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing- knowing -all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman's.

"No," she said. "I don't think he's out of his mind. You know? I just don't know if there's a sane reaction to what he… what happened to his family. Is your reaction, and mine… you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?"

"Good point," Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

"What is that?" she said.

"Weird Planet." He did not lift his pencil from the pad. "Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes." While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. "He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he's ever seen. And he's seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let's say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They're worried. They're afraid. There's one building, one immense palace he isn't allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It's all coming from the palace." He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. "The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him hemust have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He's an explorer. It's his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains."

She waited while he waited for her to ask.

"And?" she said finally.

"We're in heaven, this planet," said Sam.

"I'm not sure I-"

"It's God."

"Okay."

"God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe."

It was Rosa's turn to say, "I like it. Does He, what? I'm guessing he eats the spaceman?"

"He does."

"Peels him like a banana."