Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Sammy nodded; he wasn't going to argue with that.

"It really was something, wasn't it?" he said.

"Oh, you were all right, I suppose. But I found the pornographer extremely touching." Deasey turned to Sammy and licked his lips, as if wondering whether he ought to drop the bantering tone. "How are you holding up?"

Sammy tried again to decide how he was feeling.

"When I'm sober," he said, "I'm probably going to want to kill myself?'

"Status quo for me," Deasey said. The bartender smacked down another glass of rye in front of him.

"I don't know," Sammy said. "I know I ought to feel really bad.

Ashamed, or what have you. I know I ought to be feeling what that asshole there"-he jerked a thumb toward the bartender-"was trying to make me feel. Which I guess is what I've more or less been feeling for the last ten years of my life."

"But you don't."

"No, I don't. I feel-I don't know what the word for it would be. Relieved, I guess."

"I have been in the secrets business for a long time now, Clay," Deasey said. "Take it from me, a secret is a heavy kind of chain. I don't cotton very well to these proclivities of yours. In fact, I find them fairly revolting, particularly when I picture you personally indulging in them."

"Thanks a lot."

"But I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out in the end that Senator C. Estes Kefauver and his pals just handed you your own golden key."

"My God," Sammy said, "I think you might be right."

"Of course I'm right."

Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.

"Mr. Deasey, have you ever been to Los Angeles?"

"Once. I sensed that I could be extremely happy there."

"Why don't you go back?"

"I'm much too old to be happy, Mr. Clay. Unlike you."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "L.A."

"And what would you do out there, I wonder?"

"I don't know. Try to get work in television, maybe."

"Television, yes," Deasey said with a show of distaste. "Yes, you'd be very good at that."

There were a hundred and twoafter all; the man from the moving company said so. He and his partner had just finished stacking the last of them in the garage, around and on top of and alongside the crate that contained the pearly residue of the Golem of Prague. Joe came out to the driveway to sign for everything; he looked a little funny to Tommy, windblown or something, red in the face. His shirttails were untucked, and he jumped from foot to foot in his socks. Tommy's mother watched from the front door. She had taken off all of her city clothes and returned to her bathrobe. Joe signed and initialed the forms wherever it was required, and the movers got into their truck and drove back to the city. Then Joe and Tommy went into the garage and stood looking around at the boxes. After a while, Joe sat down on one and lit a cigarette.

"How was school?"

"We watched Dad on TV," Tommy told Joe. "Mr. Landauer brought his TV into the class."

"Uh-huh," Joe said, watching Tommy with a strange expression on his face.

"He was, well, he was sweating a lot," Tommy said.

"Oh, he was not."

"The kids all said he looked sweaty."

"What else did they say?"

"That's what they said. Can I read your comic books?"

"By all means," Joe said. "They're yours."

"You mean I can have them?"

"You're the only one that wants them."

Looking at the crates stacked like masonry in the garage gave the boy an idea; he would build himself a Bug's Nest [20]When Joe went back into the house, Tommy started dragging and shoving the stacks here and there, and after an hour he had succeeded in transferring space from the edges to the center, hollowing out a shelter for himself at the heart of the pile; a hogan of splintery, knotholed pine, open at the top to let in light from the ceiling fixture, breached by a narrow passage whose mouth he disguised with an easily moved stack of three crates. When it was done, he dropped to his hands and knees, and scrambled on his belly through the Secret Access Tube to the Innermost Cell of the Bug's Nest. There he sat, chewing on a pencil, reading comic books, and paying unconscious tribute, in his igloo of solitude, to the ice tunnels in which his father had once come to grief.

As he sat, biting down on the ridged metal collar of his pencil, stirring a sour-tasting electromagnetic ache in the filling of a molar, the Bug noticed that one of the crates that made up the walls of his Nest was different somehow from the others: time-blackened, whiskered with splinters, more spindly-looking than the other crates in Joe's hoard. He rolled onto his knees and inched toward it. He recognized it. He had seen it a thousand times, in the years before the arrival of Joe's things; lying under a canvas tarp at the back of the garage, with a bunch of other old stuff-a fabulous but sadly defunct Capehart self-changing record player, an inexplicable box full of men's combs. The crate had a loose lid of slats, crudely hinged with loops of thick wire, and a clasp of the same crooked wire, tied with a length of green string. French words and the name of France were stamped, or maybe burned into, its sides; he guessed it had once held bottles of wine.

To any boy, but in particular to one whose chronicle was contained in the sound of a roomful of adults falling silent all at once, the contents of the wine crate, ossified by dust and weather into a kind of solid unit of oblivion, would have seemed a treasure. With the precision of an archaeologist, mindful that he would have to put everything back just as he had found it, he prized apart the layers, one by one, inventorying the chance survivals of his prehistory.

1) A copy of the first issue of Radio Comics, tucked inside a translucent green cellophane school folder. Its pages yellowed and, held in the hand, bulky and swollen. The very source, the beating heart of the old-blanket odor that the box exuded.

2) Another green cellophane folder, this one stuffed with old newspaper clippings, press notices, and publicity announcements about Tommy's grandfather, the famous vaudeville strong man called the Mighty Molecule. Clipped from newspapers all over the United States, the typography queer, the writing style clotted somehow and difficult to follow, filled with obscure slang and allusions to forgotten songs and celebrities. A few photographs of a tiny man in nothing but a breechclout, whose muscular body had a dense, upholstered look, like Buster Crabbe's.

3) A drawing, folded and crumbling, of the Golem, stouter, somehow more countrified-looking than the one in Joe's epic, wearing big hobnailed boots, striding down a moonlit street. The lines, though recognizably Joe's, sketchier, more tentative, nearer to Tommy's own.

4) An envelope containing the torn stub of a movie ticket and a grainy yellowed photograph, clipped from a newspaper, of the glamorous Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio.

5) A box of unused Kavalier & Clay stationery, left over from just before the war, the letterhead a charming group portrait of all the various characters, superpowered and otherwise-Tommy recognized for certain only the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth-that the team of Kavalier & Clay had come up with in those days.

6) A manila envelope containing a large black-and-white photograph of a handsome man with hair that shone like a sheet of molded chrome. The mouth a hard thin line, but the eyes holding a reserve of delight, as if he is about to break into a smile. His jaw square, chin cleft. In the lower right corner of the picture an inscription, signed Tracy Bacon, written in a large and looping hand: To the man who dreamed me up, with affection.

7) A pair of heavy woolen socks with orange toes, in a cardboard sleeve printed with two bright orange bands. Between the bands a conventionalized picture of a merry fire in a country hearth and the word ko-zee-tos in big orange letters.