Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Judy packs her satchel and turns out her light, not forgetting to take her umbrella from its hook. She is a kind of human umbrella, folded, with her strap snapped tight. She walks down the long corridor and accidentally steps into a huge puddle; whenever it rains, Subbasement 3 begins to leak. Her feet are soaked to the ankles. Shoes squeaking, she gets into the elevator. Like a diver, she rises slowly to the surface of the city. Turning up her collar, she heads for the front door of the library. Tonight, as every night, she is the last to leave.

There is a policeman by the front doors. He is there to help guard the book.

"Good night, Miss," the policeman says as he unlocks the heavy bronze door for her. He is a big-shouldered, knuckle-chinned fellow with a twinkle in his eye because her shoes are squeaking.

"Good night." Miss Dark is mortified by the sound of her feet.

"The name's O'Hara." He has thick, shining hair, glossy as a squirt of black paint.

"Judy Dark."

"Well, Miss Dark, I have just one question."

"Yes, Officer O'Hara?"

"What's it take to get a smile out of you?"

A dozen smart retorts spring to her lips but she says nothing. She tries fervently to fix a frown on her lips but to her dismay cannot prevent herself from smiling. O'Hara takes advantage of her confusion to keep her there talking for a moment longer.

"Did you have a chance to see the book in all the confusion today, Miss Dark? Would you like me to show it to you?"

"I saw it," she says.

"And what did you think?"

"It's lovely."

"Lovely," he tries. "Is it, now?"

She nods, not meeting his gaze, and steps out into the evening. It is raining, of course. The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home. She fries her veal chop and turns on the radio. She eats her dinner and wonders why she lied to the policeman. She has not, in fact, been to see the Book of Lo, though she is dying to see it. She meant to go on her lunch break, but the crowd around its case was too big. She wonders what the book is, if not lovely.

The Book of Lo was the sacred book of the ancient and mysterious Cimmerians. Last year-as was widely reported at the time-this legendary text, long since given up for lost, turned up in the back room of an old wine cellar downtown. It is the oldest book in the world, three hundred ancient pages, in a leather case encrusted with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, devoted to the strange particulars of the worship of the great Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. Today it went on display in the grand exhibition hail of the Public Library, behind bulletproof glass. Half the city, it seemed, came to get a look. Miss Dark, driven away by the pushing crowds, returned to Office 99 without having gotten so much as a glimpse of it and ate her lunch at her desk. Now, looking up from her empty plate, at the walls of her empty apartment, she feels a sharp inward bite of regret. She ought to have taken the policeman up on his offer. Maybe, she thinks, it isn't too late. She puts on her hat and coat and a pair of dry shoes and heads back out into the night. She will tell Officer O'Hara, when she gets there, that there is work she has forgotten to do.

But when she gets there, Officer O'Hara seems to have abandoned his post, and what's more, he has left the front door unlocked. Curious, and vaguely annoyed-suppose someone really should try to steal the Book of Lo?-she wanders into the exhibit hall. There, on the black marble expanse of the floor, men in black masks stand around the fallen body of Officer O'Hara. Miss Dark ducks behind a convenient arras. She thrills with horror as the men-an apelike trio in stevedore sweaters and newsdealer caps-use a diamond-tipped can opener to slice the lid from the glass case and so relieve Empire City of its book. Hastily they stuff the book into a sack. Now: what about O'Hara? One of the thieves knows for sure, he says, that the copper made him; he and O'Hara grew up on the same block, way back when. Maybe they had better just do the poor sap in.

This is too much for the Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. She rushes into the echoing hall with a vague plan to frighten or at the very least distract the men from their evil work. Or perhaps she can lead them away by drawing their attention to herself. Taking advantage of the momentary confusion created by her appearance and her cry of "NOOOOOO!" she snatches up the sack with the sacred Book of Lo inside and runs out of the gallery. The thieves, having recovered their presence of mind, give chase now, guns drawn, curses streaming from their lips in mad torrents of printer's marks and random punctuation.

Miss Dark, terrified but not so that it prevents her from entertaining the ironic thought that for the first time in her life she knows what it feels like to have men chasing after her, heads for the safest place she knows: her neat, square hole underground. She cannot afford to wait for the elevator. Running headlong down the fire stairs she is struck by the odd feeling that the Book of Lo has come to pulsing life in her arms; but no, that's just the reverberation of her own pounding heart.

They catch her in the long corridor of Subbasement 3. She turns, a gun glints, then sprouts a bright white flower. But the shot, in that dark, cramped corridor, goes wild. It ricochets, knitting a wild web of velocity trails across the corridor before settling, finally, into the meat of a conduit in the ceiling. The pipe snaps in half, and out of it tumbles a live power line, like a snake falling from a tree onto a piglet. It lands in the very puddle that earlier ruined Miss Dark's shoes. Now many watts of power course through her slender frame, and through the circuitry of gems and gold wire on the leather case of the Book of Lo. A flash turns everything white but the black roentgen skeleton of Miss Judy Dark, and she utters a somewhat unladylike cry of "YE-OOOW!"

"Nice shot," says one of the thieves. They lift the book from her slack grip and make off with it to the surface world, leaving Miss Judy Dark for dead.

Which she very well may be. She flies, hair streaming, upward through a spiral column of smoke and light. The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth's wings. They are a pale greenish-white and have a translucent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman's airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid. All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies. Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle. Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride-for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.

Finally, in the immeasurable and timeless distance, she makes out something that has the appearance of solidity, a smudge of stony gray, wavering. As she draws nearer, she glimpses a flash of silver, a ghostly stand of cypress, the plinth and columns of a temple, rough-hewn, pyramidal, at once Druidic and Babylonian, and withal vaguely reminiscent of the great institution in whose bowels she has for so long dreamed away her days. It looms ever larger, and then the spiral finally unravels around her and gives out, depositing her, clothed now only in the clasp of her wings, on the temple's threshold. The great doors, cast from solid silver and ornamented with crescent moons, creak as they slowly open inward to admit her. With a final glance back toward the shattered chrysalis of her old life, she steps through the portal and into a high chamber. Here, in a weird radiance cast by the tails of a thousand writhing glowworms, sits on a barbarous throne a raven-haired giantess with immense green wings, sensuously furred antennae, and a sharp expression. She is, quite obviously, the Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. We know it before she even opens her rowanberry mouth.