Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Hum," she said. And then, "Maybe not yet."

"I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone.

"How did you do it, anyway?" she said. The tips of her teeth were stained with tea. "Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean."

"I was never on it," Joe said. "I went out on a plane the night before."

"There were orders. I don't know, medical certificates. Sammy showed me the photostats."

He put on a mysterious Cavalieri smile.

"Always true to the code," she said.

"It was very cleverly done."

"I'm sure it was, dear. You were always a clever boy."

He pressed his lips to the parting of her hair. It had an intriguing match-head smell of the Lapsang she preferred.

"What are we going to do?" he said.

She didn't answer at first. She let go and stepped away from him, head tilted to one side, arching a brow; a taunting look that he remembered very well from their previous time together.

"I have an idea," she said. "Why don't you try to figure out where we're going to put all your goddamned comic books?"

NINETY-FIVE, NINETY-SIX, N I N ET Y-S E VE N. NINETY-SEVEN." "A hundred and two."

"I count ninety-seven."

"You miscounted."

"We're going to need a truck."

"This is what I have been telling you."

"A truck and then a whole fucking warehouse."

"I've always wanted a warehouse," Joe said. "That's always been the dream of mine."

Though Joe preferred to remain vague on the subject of just how many comic books, crammed into pine crates of his own manufacture- complete runs of Action and Detective, Blackhawk and Captain America, of Crime Does Not Pay and Justice Traps the Guilty, of Classics Illustrated and Picture Stories from the Bible, of Whiz and Wow and Zip and Zoot and Smash and Crash and Pep and Punch, of Amazing and Thrilling and Terrific and Popular-he actually owned, there was nothing at all vague about the letter he had received from lawyers representing Realty Associates Securities Corporation, the owners of the Empire State Building. Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., had been evicted for violating the terms of its lease, which meant that the ninety-seven or one hundred and two wooden crates, filled with comic books, that Joe had amassed- along with all of his other belongings-must either be transported or disposed of.

"So toss 'em," Sammy said. "What's the big deal?"

Joe sighed. Although all the world-even Sammy Clay, who had spent most of his adult life making and selling them-viewed them as trash, Joe loved his comic books: for their inferior color separation, their poorly trimmed paper stock, their ads for air rifles and dance courses and acne creams, for the basement smell that clung to the older ones, the ones that had been in storage during Joe's travels. Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art. Comic books had sustained his sanity during his time on the psychiatric ward at Gitmo. For the whole of the fall and winter following his return to the mainland, which Joe spent shivering in a rented cabin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, with the wind whistling in through the chinks in the clapboard, half-poisoned by the burned-hair smell of an old electric heater, it was only ten thousand Old Gold cigarettes and a pile of Captain Marvel Adventures (comprising the incredible twenty-four-month epic struggle between the Captain and a telepathic, world-conquering earthworm, Mr. Mind) that had enabled Joe to fight off, once and for all, the craving for morphine with which he had returned from the Ice.

Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history-his home-the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt-especially right after the war-a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waistedgoddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss-though he would never have spoken of it in these terms-was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic-not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world-the reality- that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.

"I know you think it's all just crap," he said. "But you should not of all people think this."

"Yeah, yeah," Sammy said. "Okay."

"What are you looking at?"

Sammy had edged his way out into Miss Smyslenka's office and was untying one of the stacked portfolios. At nine o'clock that morning, on his way into the Pharaoh offices, he had dropped Joe off here, to begin the laborious process of clearing himself out. It was nearly eight p.m. now, and Joe had been dragging, packing, and repacking, without a break, all day. His shoulders ached, and his fingertips were raw, and he was feeling out of sorts. It had been disorienting to come back here and. find everything as he had left it-and then to have to begin to dismantle it. And he was stung by the look in Sammy's eye just now when he walked in and found Joe still at work, finishing the job. Sammy had looked pleasantly surprised-not that the job was finished, Joe thought, so much as to find that Joe was still there. They all thought-all three of them-that he was going to leave them again.

"I'm just taking another look at these pages of yours," Sammy said. "This is beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. I'm really looking forward to reading it all."

"I don't think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark."

"It does seem dark."

"Too dark for a comic book, I think."

"Is this the beginning? God, look at that splash." Sammy, his overcoat slung over one arm, sank to the floor beside the broad pile of black cardboard portfolios that they had bought this morning at Pearl Paints, so that Joe could pack up his five years of work. His voice turned dark and cobwebbed. "The Golem!" He shook his head, studying the first splash page-there were forty-seven splash pages in all-at the head of the first chapter of the 2,256-page comic book that Joe had produced during his time at Kornblum Vanishing Creams; he had just begun work on the forty-eighth and final chapter when Tommy gave him up to the authorities.