Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"I come to be pesky once again," Joe would say, in his increasingly slang-deformed English, and then take from the breast pocket of his jacket a slim humidor filled with five fifteen-cent panatelas or, when the clerk was a woman, a folding paper fan patterned with pink flowers, or simply a pearly-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. And she would take the fan or the soda pop, and listen to his pleas, and want to help him very much. But there was little to be done. Every month, Joe's income increased, and every month, he managed to put more and more money away, only to find that there was nothing to spend it on. The bribes and bureaucratic lubrications of the first years of the protectorate were a thing of the past. At the same time, obtaining a United States visa, never an easy thing, had become nearly impossible. By last month, when his own permanent residency had been approved, he had accumulated and sent to the State Department seven affidavits from noted New York gland doctors and psychiatrists attesting to the fact that the three senior members of his family would be unique and valuable additions to the populace of his adopted country. With each passing month, however, the number of refugees making their way to America shrank, and the news from home grew darker and more fragmentary. There was word of relocations, resettlements; the Jews of Prague were all to be sent to Madagascar, to Terezin, to a vast autonomous reservation in Poland. And Joe found himself in receipt of three officially discouraging letters from the Undersecretary for Visas, and a polite suggestion that he make no further inquiries in this regard.

His sense of entrapment in the toils of bureaucracy, of being powerless to help or free his family, also found its way into the comics. For as the Escapist's powers were augmented, the restraints required to contain him, either by his enemies or (as happened more rarely now) by himself when he was performing, grew more elaborate, even baroque. There were gigantic razor-jawed bear traps, tanks filled with electric sharks. The Escapist was tied to immense gas rings into which his captors needed only to toss a stray cigar butt to incinerate him, strapped to four rumbling panzers pointed in the cardinal directions, chained to an iron cherry at the bottom of an immense steel tumbler into which a forty-ton frothing "milkshake" of fresh concrete was poured, hung from the spring-loaded firing pin of an immense cannon aimed at the capital of "Occupied Latvonia" so that if he freed himself, thousands of innocent citizens would die. The Escapist was laid, lashed and manacled, in the paths of threshing machines, pagan juggernauts, tidal waves, and swarms of giant prehistoric bees revived by the evil science of the Iron Chain. He was imprisoned in ice, in strangling vines, in cages of fire.

Now it seemed very warm in the subway car. The fan in the center of the ceiling was motionless. A bead of sweat splashed a panel in the story about the fire-spewing Flame, lean and balletic in the great Lou Fine style, that Joe had been pretending to read. He closed the comic book and stuck it back in his pocket. He began to feel that he could not breathe. He loosened his tie and walked down to the end of the car, where there was an open louver. A faint black ripple of breeze blew from the tunnel, but it was sour and unrefreshing. At the Union Square station, a seat became available and Joe took it. He sat back and closed his eyes. He could not seem to rid his mind of the phrase superintend its population of Jews. All of his greatest fears for his family's safety seemed to lie folded within the bland envelope of that first word. Over the past year, his family had had their bank accounts frozen. They had been forced out of the public parks of Prague, out of the sleeping and dining cars of the state railways, out of the public schools and universities. They could no longer even ride the streetcars. Lately the regulations had grown more complex. Perhaps in an effort to expose the telltale badge of a yarmulke, Jews were now forbidden to wear caps. They were not allowed to carry knapsacks. They were not permitted to eat onions or garlic; also banned was the eating of apples, cheese, or carp.

Joe reached into his pocket and took out the orange that Anapol had given him. It was big and smooth and perfectly spherical, and oranger than anything Joe had ever seen. No doubt it would have seemed a prodigy in Prague, monstrous and illicit. He held it to his nose and inhaled, trying to find some kind of cheer or comfort in the bright volatile oils of its skin. But instead, he felt only panic. His breath was shallow and labored. The sour tunnel smell pouring in through the open louver seemed to drive away everything else. All at once, the shark of dread that never deserted its patrol of Joe's innards rose to the surface. You cannot save them, said a voice very close to his ear. He turned around. There was no one.

He found himself looking at the back page of the newspaper, a Times, that was being read by the man in the seat beside him, and his eye alighted on the shipping column. The Rotterdam , he saw, was due in port at eight a.m.-twenty minutes from now.

Joe had often entertained fantasies of the day he would go to greet his family as they disembarked from the Rotterdam or the Nieuw Amsterdam. He knew that the Holland America docks were across the river, in Hoboken. You had to ride the ferry to get there. When the train pulled into the Eighth Street station, Joe got off.

He walked along Eighth Street, over to Christopher, then to the river, threading his way like a pickpocket through the crowds just off the ferryboats from New Jersey: taut-jawed men in stiff hats and suits and obsidian shoes, newspapers pinned under their arms; brusque, brick-lipped, hard-heeled women in floral dresses. They stampeded down the ramps and onto Christopher and then scattered like raindrops blown across a window. Jostled, excusing himself, offering his apologies as he stumbled against them, half overwhelmed by the acrid miasma of cigar smoke and violent coughing they brought with them from the other shore, Joe nearly gave up and turned back.

But then he arrived at the huge, peeling shed that served the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad ferries on the Manhattan side. It was a grand old barn whose high central gable was improbably endowed with the lilting pediment of a Chinese pagoda. The people disembarking here from New Jersey retained a faint air of wind and adventure, hats askew, neckties disarranged. The smell of the Hudson River that filled the building stirred memories of the Moldau. The ferryboats themselves amused Joe. They were wide craft, low-slung, upcurving at either end like dented hats, trailing pompous billows of black smoke from their solemn funnels. The pair of big wheelhouses on either side of the boats sent Joe's imagination drifting down the bear-haunted Mississippi to New Orleans.

He stood on the foredeck, hat in hand, squinting into the haze as the terminus of the DL &W and the low red roofline of Hoboken drew nearer. He breathed in coal smoke and a whiff of salt, wide-awake and flush now with the optimism of transit. The color of the water shifted in bands that ran from verdigris to cold coffee. The river was as crowded as the city itself: garbage scows piled high, swarming with gulls; tankers pumped full of petroleum, kerosene, or linseed oil; anonymous black cargo ships and, in the distance, at once thrilling and terrible, the magnificent steamship of the Holland America Line on the arm of its proud tugboat escort, lofty, remote. Behind Joe lay the jumble, at once regular and random, of Manhattan, strung like the roadbed of a bridge between the high suspending piers of midtown and Wall Street.

At a certain point about halfway through the crossing, he was taunted by a hopeful apparition. The mad spires of Ellis Island and the graceful tower of the New Jersey Central terminus came into conjunction, merging to form a kind of crooked red crown. It was, for a moment, as if Prague herself were floating there, right off the docks of Jersey City, in a shimmer of autumn haze, not even two miles away.