Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Whoa!" cried the patrolman, who had come to inquire as to just what Joe meant by holding up the traffic on Fifth Avenue like this, at the busiest hour of the morning. He jumped away from the car, hopping on one leg, clutching at his shining left shoe with both hands.

Joe rolled down the window.

"You just ran over my foot!" the policeman said.

"I'm so sorry," Joe said.

The policeman returned his shoe to the pavement, cautiously, then settled his considerable weight onto it a little at a time. "I think it's all right. You ran over the empty bit at the toe. Lucky for you."

"I borrowed this car from my cousin," Joe said. "I maybe don't know it as well as I should."

"Yeah, well, you can't sit here, bub. You've been here ten minutes. You have to move on."

"That's impossible," Joe said. It could not have been more than one or two at the most. "Ten minutes."

The patrolman tapped his wrist. "I had my watch on you the minute you pulled up."

"I'm sorry, Officer," Joe said. "I just can't to figure out what I'm supposed to do now." He gestured with a thumb toward the Workingman's Credit Building. "My money's in there," he said.

"I don't care if your left buttock is in there," the policeman said. "You'll have to get lost, mister."

Joe started to argue, but as he did he was aware that, from the moment the policeman rapped on the window, he had been feeling immensely relieved. It had been decided for him. He could not park here; he would not be able to get the money today. Maybe it was not such a good idea after all. He put the car in gear.

"Okay," he said. "I will."

In the course of trying to find his way back out to Long Island, he managed to get very effectively lost in Queens. He was nearly to the old World's Fair grounds before he realized his mistake and turned around.

After a while, he found himself driving alongside a vast green stretch of cemeteries, which he recognized as Cypress Hills. Tombstones and monuments dotted the rolling hills like sheep in a Claude Lorrain. He had been here once, years before, soon after his return to the city. It had been Halloween night, and a group of the boys from Tannen's back room had persuaded him to join them in their yearly visit to the grave of Harry Houdini, who was buried here in a Jewish cemetery called Machpelah. They had taken sandwiches and flasks and a thermos of coffee and spent the night gossiping about Mrs. Houdini's surprisingly involved love life after her husband's death and waiting for the spirit of the Mysteriarch to appear, as Houdini had promised that, should such a thing turn out to be feasible, it would. At the break of dawn on All Hallows' Day, they had joked and whistled and pretended to be disappointed at Houdini's failure to show, but in Joe's case at least-and he suspected it had been so for some of the others-the show of disappointment had only served to mask the actual disappointment that he felt. Joe did not in the least believe in an afterlife, but he genuinely wished that he could. An old Christian kook in the public library in Halifax had once attempted to comfort Joe by telling him, with an air of great assurance, that it was Hitler, and not the Allies, who had liberated the Jews. Not since his father's death-not since the day he had first heard a radio report about the wonder ghetto at Terezin-had Joe stood so near to consolation. All he would have needed to do, to find comfort in the Christian's words, was to believe.

He was able to find Machpelah again without too much trouble-it was marked by a large, rather gloomily splendid funerary building of vaguely Levantine design that reminded Joe of Rosa's father's house- and he drove through the gates and parked the car. Houdini's tomb was the largest and most splendid in the cemetery, completely out of keeping with the general modesty, even austerity, of the other headstones and slabs. It was a curious structure, like a spacious balcony detached from the side of a palace, a letter C of marble balustrade with pillars like serifs at either end, enclosing a long low bench. The pillars had inscriptions in English and Hebrew. At the center, above the laconic inscription houdini, a bust of the late magician glowered, looking as if he had just licked a battery. A curious statue of a robed, weeping woman was posed alongside the bench, sprawled against it in a kind of eternal grieving swoon; Joe found it quite gauche and disturbing. There were nosegays and wreaths scattered around in various states of decay, and many of the surfaces were littered with small stones, left by family, Joe supposed, or by Jewish admirers. Houdini's parents and siblings were all buried here: everyone but his late wife, Bess, who had been refused admission because she was an unconverted Catholic. Joe read the prolix tributes to the mother and the rabbi father that Houdini had quite obviously composed himself. He wondered what he would have put on his own parents' tombstones had he been given the opportunity. Names and dates alone seemed extravagance enough.

He started picking up the stones that people had left, and arranged them neatly atop the railing, as it were, of the balcony, in lines and circles and Stars of David. He noticed that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and there, wherever there was a seam or a crack. He took them out and unrolled the little strips and read what people had written. They all seemed to be messages left by various devotees of spiritualism and students of the next world who offered posthumous forgiveness to the great debunker for having oppugned the Truth that he had, by now, undoubtedly discovered. After a while, Joe sat down on the bench, a safe distance away from the statue of the woman crying out her eyes. He took a deep breath, and shook his head, and reached out some inward fingers, tentatively, to see if they brushed against some remnant of Harry Houdini or Thomas Kavalier or anyone at all. No; he could be ruined again and again by hope, but he would never be capable of belief.

Presently, he made a pillow of his coat and lay back on the cold marble bench. He could hear the rumbling surf of traffic on the Inter-borough Parkway, the intermittent sigh of airbrakes from a bus on Jamaica Avenue. The sounds seemed to correspond exactly to the pale gray sky that he was looking up at, intermittently bruised with blue. He closed his eyes for a moment, just to listen to the sky for a little while. At a certain point, he became aware of footsteps in the grass beside him. He sat up and looked out at the brilliant green field-the sun was shining now, somehow-and the hillsides with their flocks of white sheep, and saw, coming toward him, in his cutaway coat, his old teacher Bernard Kornblum. Kornblum's cheeks were raw and his eyes bright and critical. His beard was tied up in a net.

"Lieber Meister" Josef said, reaching toward him with both hands. They held on to each other across the gulf that separated them like the tzigane-dancing steeples of the Queensboro Bridge. "What should I do?"

Kornblum puffed out his peeling cheeks and shook his head, rolling his eyes a little as if this was among the more stupid questions he had ever been asked.

"For God's sake," he said. "Go home."

When Joe walked in the front door of 127 Lavoisier Drive, he was nearly knocked off his feet. Rosa dangled by one arm from his neck and, with the other, punched him on the arm, hard. Her jaw was set, and he could see that she was refusing to let herself cry. Tommy bumped up against him a couple of times, like a dog, then stepped awkwardly away, backing into the hi-fi cabinet and upsetting a pewter vase of dried marigolds. After that, they both started talking all at once. Where have you been? Why didn't you call? What's in the box? How would you like some rice pudding?