Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Finally she couldn't stand it anymore and threw off the pillow.

"What the hell are you doing?"

He jumped and knocked his cigarette from the ashtray on her dressing table. He retrieved it, brushing ash from the carpet, then came over and sat on the bed. "How long were you watching?"

"An hour," she lied.

He nodded. Had he really been standing there like that for an hour, giving himself the evil eye and marveling at nothing?

"You looked like you were trying to hypnotize yourself or something."

"I guess I was. I guess I'm a little nervous," he said. As he spent night after night in the company of inveterate and literate talkers, his English had improved considerably. "Performing in front of your family. Your father." Rosa 's father had not appeared at a Saks family event in years, but he was attending the reception tonight just to see Joe perform. He had been invited to the religious portion of the proceedings that morning, too, at B'nai Jeshurun, but God forbid. He hadn't been inside a synagogue, he calculated, since 1899. "Right now he thinks I'm the best magician in New York," Joe continued. "Because he's never seen me. After tonight, maybe he'll think I'm a palooka."

"He'll love you," she said. She was touched to see that her father's opinion meant so much to him. She interpreted it as further evidence of his belonging to her. "Don't worry."

"Mm-hmm," he said. "You already think I'm a palooka."

"Not me," she said, running a hand up his thigh and taking hold of his penis, which at once began to show renewed interest in her. "I know you're magic."

She had seen his act twice now. The truth was that Joe was a talented but careless performer, liable to bite off more than he could chew. He had renewed his career, as promised, with the Hoffman reception at the Hotel Trevi the previous November, and had gotten off to a rather shaky start when-forgetting the disdain in which his teacher Bernard Kornblum had held such "mechanisms," and succumbing to his fatal weakness, from which he suffered all his life, for acts of daring and the beau geste-he became hopelessly entangled in the Emperor's Dragon, an elaborate set-piece trick that he had purchased, on credit, from Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. It was a hoary bit of mock-Chinese flummery from the heyday of Ching Ling Foo, in which a silk "dragon" in a brass cage was made to breathe fire, then lay a number of colored eggs, each presented to the inspection of a witness for signs of seams or apertures before it was cracked with a silver wand, disgorging some personal item belonging to a member of the audience who, up to this point, had not been aware of his watch's or lighter's disappearance from his or her person. Picking pockets had never been Joe's great strength, however, and he was long out of practice. In the Trevi's lobby, before the show, there was an unpleasant incident with the bar mitzvah boy's aunt Ida, involving her beaded handbag, which had to be hastily smoothed over by Hermann Hoffman; and, during the performance, Joe singed off his own right eyebrow. He had moved quickly into cards and coins after that, and here his renewed training and the native gifts of his fingers served him well. He caused half-dollars and queens to behave in bizarre ways, endowed them with sentience and emotions, transformed them into kinds of weather, raising storms of aces and calling down nickel lightning from the sky. After Joe finished his act, young Maurice Hoffman brought over a friend who was having his own bar mitzvah in two weeks and had determined to impel his parents to hire Joe for the affair. More bookings followed: all at once Joe discovered that he had become the fashionable entertainer among the wealthy, male Jewish adolescents of the Upper West Side, many of them, of course, loyal readers of Empire comic books. They didn't seem to care that from time to time an ace dropped from his watchband or that he misread their minds. They adored him, and he accepted their adoration. In fact, he seemed actively to seek out the company of thirteen-year-old boys, not so much because it gratified his ego, Rosa thought, as because he longed to see his brother again so badly. And because their company- respectful, sardonic, willing to be awed, stubborn in their desire to get to the bottom of each trick-seemed to promise good things for Thomas on his arrival: friends of raucous intelligence, at once innocent and hard-edged, homely or handsome but uniformly well dressed, their faces free of all shadow save those of acne or an incipient beard. These were boys who lived free of the fear of invasion, occupation, cruel and arbitrary laws. With Rosa 's encouragement, Joe began, tentatively at first and then with great ardor, to envision the transformation of his brother into an American boy.

Sometimes, when he was making arrangements with the parents beforehand, the name of Houdini came up, and Joe would be asked if he might (naturally with a commensurate increase in his fee) perform an escape; but here he drew the line.

"I escaped from Prague," he would say, looking down at his bare wrists as if for the reddened trace of a manacle. "I think maybe that is enough."

Here the parents, exchanging looks with Rosa, would invariably agree and write him out a check for a hundred dollars. It had never seemed to occur to Joe that the reason for his sudden popularity on the West Side bar mitzvah circuit was neither the erratic skill of his prestigious digits, nor the unwavering fervor of his young fans, but rather the sympathy those parents felt for a homeless Jewish boy who had somehow managed to get out from under the shadow of the billowing black flag that was unfurling across Europe, and who was known to donate his entire fee to the Transatlantic Rescue Agency.

"I'm not getting any better," he said now, watching abstractly as he expanded in her hand. "Really, it's embarrassing. At Tannen's they all make fun of me."

"You're much better than you used to be," she said, and then added, with just a hint of self-servingness: "Everything's much better, isn't it?"

"Much better," he said, moving a little in her grasp. "Yes. Much."

When she first met him, he had been such a forlorn, solitary figure, bruised and broken from all his street fighting, with the little fireplug, Sammy Clay, his lone prop and associate. Now he had friends, down at that magic shop of his, and in the New York art world. He had changed; she had changed him. In the pages of Radio Comics -Rosa was now a loyal reader-he and the Escapist continued to fight the forces of the Iron Chain, in battles that were increasingly grotesque and ornate. But the sad futility of the struggle, which Joe had sensed so early in his run on the magazine and which had been immediately apparent to Rosa, seemed to have begun to overtake the ingenuity of his pen. Month after month, the Escapist ground the armies of evil into paste, and yet here they were in the spring of 1941 and Adolf Hitler's empire was more extensive than Bonaparte's. In the pages of Triumph, the Four Freedoms [9]attained the orgasmically impossible goal of killing Hitler, only to learn in the next issue that their victim had been merely a mechanical double. Though Joe kept fighting, Rosa could see that his heart had gone out of the mayhem. It was in the pages of All Doll, in realms far from Zothenia or Prague, that Joe's art now blossomed.

Luna Moth was a creature of the night, of the Other World, of mystic regions where evil worked by means of spells and curses instead of bullets, torpedoes, or shells. Luna fought in the wonderworld against specters and demons, and defended all us unsuspecting dreamers against attack from the dark realms of sleep. Twice now she had flapped into battle against slavering Elder Creatures readying vast interdimensional armadas of demons, and while it was easy enough to see such plots as allegories of paranoia, invasion, and world war, and Joe's work here as a continuation of the internecine conflict of Radio and Triumph, the art Joe turned in for Luna Moth was very different from his work on the other books. Rosa 's father, with his eye for native American sources of the Surrealist idea, had introduced Joe to the work of Winsor McKay. The urban dreamscapes, the dizzying perspectives, the playful tone, and the bizarre metamorphoses and juxtapositions of Little Nemo in Slumberland all quickly found their way into Joe's pages for Luna Moth. Suddenly the standard three tiers of quadrangular panels became a prison from which he had to escape. They hampered his efforts to convey the dislocated and non-Euclidean dream spaces in which Luna Moth fought. He sliced up his panels, stretched and distorted them, cut them into wedges and strips. He experimented with benday dots, cross-hatching, woodcut effects, and even crude collage. [10]Through this bravura landscape of twilight flew a wisecracking, powerful young woman with immense breasts, fairy wings, and furry antennae. The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself. She could see Joe, in each new issue, contending with the conventions and cliches of Sammy's more than usually literate stories, working his way toward some kind of breakthrough in his art. And she was determined to be there when he did. She had a feeling that she was going to be the only one to notice or appreciate it when it happened; to her, Joe had that authentic air of the solitary bricoleur, the potterer of genius, like the Facteur Cheval or that strange and diffident other Joe, Mr. Cornell, striking out toward the sublime in a vessel constructed of the commonplace, the neglected, the despised. Being there, supporting him in whatever way she could, at that moment of embarkation and on all the brilliant journey that would follow, had become a key element, along with helping him bring over his brother, and binding her to him and to America with unbreakable bonds, in her mission of love. As for the practice of her own art, that had always been less a matter of mission than of long, moody habit, a way of snatching at her emotions and ideas as they flitted past and pinning them, as it were, to canvas before they could elude her gaze. In the end, it would take far less time for theworld, or at least that small portion of the world that read and thought about comic books, to acclaim Joe's genius than it took for anyone- least of all Rosa-to acknowledge her own.