Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Wow."

"Hurt?"

He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Anyway," she said. "I had a ticket from New York to Cartagena on the Bernardo. On March twenty-fifth, 1939. On the twenty-third, my stepmother died very suddenly. My father was devastated. I postponed sailing for a week. On the thirty-first, the Falangists took Madrid."

Joe remembered the Fall of Madrid. It had come two weeks after the fall, uncapitalized, disregarded, of Prague.

"You were disappointed?"

"Crushed." She cocked her head to one side, as if listening to the echo of the word she had just uttered. She gave her head a decisive shake. A curl slipped free of its pin and tumbled down the side of her face. She brushed it irritably to one side. "You want to know something? Honestly, I was relieved. What a coward, huh?"

"I don't think so."

"Oh, yes. I am. A big coward. That's why I just keep daring myself to do things I'm afraid of doing."

He had a notion. "Such things like?"

"Like bringing you up here to my room."

This was unquestionably the moment to kiss her. Now he was the coward. He leaned over and started to flip with his good hand through a stack of paintings by the bed. "Very good," he said after a moment. Her brushwork seemed hasty and impatient, but her portraits-the term "still life" did not suffice-of produce, canned foods, and the occasional trotter or lamb chop were at once whimsical, worshipful, and horrifying, and managed to suggest their subjects perfectly without wasting too much time on the details. Her line was very strong; she could draw as well as he, perhaps better. But she took no pains with her work. The paint was streaked, blotchy, studded with dirt and bristles; the edges of paintings often were left ragged and blank; where she couldn't get something quite right, she just blotted it out with furious, petulant strokes. "I can almost to smell them. What murder?"

"Huh?"

"You said there was a murder."

"Oh, yes. Caddie Horslip. She was a socialite or a debutante or-they hung my great-granduncle for it. Moses Espinoza. It was a huge sensation at the time, back in the eighteen-sixties, I think." She noticed that she was still holding his hand. She let it go. "There. Good as new. Have you got a cigarette?"

He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.

"He was a lepidopterist, Moses," she said.

"A-?"

"He studied moths."

"Oh."

"He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that's what my father says. He's probably lying. I made a dreambook about it."

"A pin," he said. "Ouch." He waggled his finger. "It's good, I think. You fixed it."

"Hey, how about that."

"Thank you, Rosa."

"You're welcome, Joe. Joe. You don't make a very convincing Joe."

"Not yet," he said. He flexed his hand, turned it over, studied it. "Am I going to be able to draw?"

"I don't know, can you draw now?"

"I'm not bad. What's a dreambook?"

She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. "Would you like to see one?"

Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn's Octet.

"Here, this is one. I can't seem to find the Caddie Horslip."

"Really?" he said dryly. "What a surprise."

"Don't be smart, it's unattractive in a man."

He handed the cigarette to her and took from her a large, clothbound book, black with a red spine. It was an accounts ledger, swollen to twice its normal thickness, like a book left out in the rain, from all the things pasted into it. When he turned to the first page, he found the words "Airplane Dream #13" written in an odd, careful hand like a scattering of spindly twigs.

"Numbered," he said. "It's like a comic book."

"Well, there are just so many. I'd lose track."

"Airplane Dream #13" told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it-there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery-but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were images from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled Crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been thoroughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in drawings and diagrams, and an elaborate system of cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books. Joe started to read sitting down in her desk chair, but before long, without noticing, he had risen to his feet and started pacing around the room. He stepped on a moth without noticing.

"These must take hours," he said.

"Hours."

"How many have you done?"

She pointed to a painted chest at the foot of her bed. "A lot."

"It is beautiful. Exciting."

He sat down on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him about what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him andwhat he did, an artist. He described the hours he had put into his covers, lavishing detail on the flanges and fins of a death-wave generator, distorting and exaggerating his perspectives with mathematic precision, dressing up Sammy and Julie and the others and taking test photographs to get his poses right, painting luscious plumes of fire that, when printed, seemed to burn the slick ink and paper of the cover itself. He told her about his experiments with a film vocabulary, his sense of the emotional moment of a panel, and of the infinitely expandable and contractible interstice of time that lay between the panels of a comic book page. Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.

At some point, he noticed that she was looking at him with a strange air of expectancy, or dread, and he stopped. "What is it?"

"Lampedusa," she said.

"What's that? Lampedusa?"

Her eyes widened as she waited, in expectancy or dread. She nodded.

"You mean the island?"

"Oh!" She threw her arms around his neck, and he fell backward on the bed. Moths scattered. The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth's wing.

"Hey!" said Joe. Then she settled her mouth on his and left it there, lips parted, whispering an unintelligible dreambook sentence.

"Hello? Hey! Joe, you up here?"

Joe sat up. "Shit."

"Is that your brother?"

"My cousin Sam. My partner. In here, Sam," he said.