Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Sammy heard the metallic chirp of the hinge of a cigarette lighter, the scrape of its flint, and then a spark swelled magically and became the flickering face of Tracy Bacon.

"Now yours," he said.

Sammy lit his lighter. Together they managed to generate just enough light to see that they were camped far to one side of the display, in the middle of a wide, forested area half an inch high. Tracy stood up and started toward the center. Sammy followed him, protecting the flame. The surface of the floor beneath their feet was covered in a kind of rough, dry artificial moss that was meant to suggest vast rolling hills of trees. It made a crunching sound that echoed in the high empty dome. Every so often, though they tried to be careful, one of them stepped on a model farmhouse, or crushed the amusement district or central orphanage of a town of the future. Finally they reached the major city, at the very center of the diorama, which had been known as Centerville or Centerton or something equally imaginative. A single skyscraper rose from a cluster of smaller buildings. All the buildings looked streamlined and moderne, like a city on Mongo, or the Emerald

City in The Wizard of Oz. Bacon got down on one knee and brought his eyes level with the top of the lone tower.

"Huh," he said. He frowned, then lowered himself and leaned forward on one arm, slowly, taking care not to extinguish his flame, until he was lying flat on his belly along the ground. "Huh," he said again, grunting it this time. He lowered his chin to the ground. "Yeah. This is the way. I don't think I would have liked just floating over it near as much."

Sammy went over and stood beside Bacon for a moment. Then he eased himself down on the ground beside him. He folded an arm under his chest and, inclining his head slightly, squinted his eyes, trying to lose himself in the illusion of the model the way he used to lose himself in Futuria, back at his drawing board in Flatbush a million years before. He was a twentieth of an inch tall, zipping along an oceanic highway in his little antigravity Skyflivver, streaking past the silent faces of the aspiring silvery buildings. It was a perfect day in a perfect city. A double sunset flickered in the windows and threw shadows across the leafy squares of the city. His fingertips were on fire.

"Ow!" Sammy said, dropping his lighter. "Ouch!"

Bacon let his own flame go out. "You have to kind of pad it with your necktie, dopey," he said. He grabbed Sammy's hand. "This the one?"

"Yeah," Sammy said. "The first two fingers. Oh. Okay."

They lay there for a few seconds, in the dark, in the future, with Sammy's sore fingertips in Tracy Bacon's mouth, listening to the fabulous clockwork of their hearts and lungs, and loving each other.

ON the last day of November, Joe had a letter from Thomas. In an execrable left-slanting hand, he announced, employing a sardonic tone that had not been present in his first letters from Lisbon, that the old tub-after a series of delays, reversals, mechanical failures, and governmental tergiversations, had finally been cleared- yet again-for departure, on the second of December. More than eight months had now passed since Thomas's journey from the Moldau to the Tagus. The boy had turned thirteen on a cot in the crowded refectory of the convent of Nossa Senhora de Monte Carmel, and in his letter he warned Joe that he suffered from a mysterious tendency to start rattling off paternosters and Hail Marys at the drop of a hat, and had become partial to wimples. He claimed to be afraid that Joe would not recognize him for the spots on his face and the "apparently permanent pubertal smudge on my upper lip that some have the temerity to call a mustache." When Joe had finished reading the letter, he kissed it and pressed it to his chest. He remembered the immigrant's fear of going unrecognized in a land of strangers, of being lost in the translation from there to here.

The following day Rosa came straight to the Empire offices from the T.R.A. and burst into tears in Joe's arms. She told Joe that Mr. Hoffman had, almost as an afterthought, placed a call that afternoon to the Washington offices of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, just to make certain that everything was in order. To his astonishment, he had been told by the chairman of the committee that it looked as though all of the children's visas were going to be revoked for reasons of "state security." The head of the State Department's visa section, Breckinridge Long, a man with, as the chairman carefully put it, "certain antipathies," had long since established a clear policy of refusing visas to Jewish refugees. Hoffman knew that perfectly well. But in this instance, he argued, the visas had already been issued, the ship was about to depart, and the "security risks" were three hundred and nineteen children! The chairman sympathized. He apologized. He expressed profound regret and embarrassment at this unfortunate turn of events. Then he hung up.

"I see" was Joe's only response when Rosa, perched on his high stool, had finished her tale. With one hand he stroked mechanically at the back of her head. With the other he spun the striker of his cigarette lighter, sparking it over and over again. Rosa was ashamed and confused. She felt that she ought to be comforting Joe, but here she was, in the middle of the Empire workroom, with a bunch of guys staring at her over their drawing boards, bawling into his shirtfront, while he stood patting her hair and saying, "There, there." His shoulders were tensed, his breathing shallow. She could feel the anger building inside him. Each time the lighter sparked, she flinched.

"Oh, honey," she said. "I wish there was something we could do. Someone we could turn to."

"Huh," Joe said, and then "Look here." He took hold of her shoulders and spun her around on the stool. On a low table next to his drawing board lay a stack of lettered but uninked comic book pages on big sheets of Bristol board. Joe shuffled through the stack of pages, passing them to her one by one. They presented a story that was narrated by the custodian at the Statue of Liberation, a tall, stooped man with a mop and a billed cap, drawn to look a lot like George Deasey. Apparently, the unfortunate fellow had a bone to pick with "that long-underwear bunch." He then went on to describe how, just that morning, he had watched in horror as Professor Percival "Smarty" Pantz, hapless know-it-all rival of Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, performed an "electro-brain implantation procedure" on the Lady. The idea was to enlist the statue in the effort to keep the skies of Empire City clear of enemy planes and airships. "She'll be able to swat Messerschmitts like mosquitoes!" Pantz crowed. Instead, thanks to the usual miscalculation on the part of Dr. Pantz, she had, upon awakening, gone off striding across the bay toward Empire City, her spike-crowned electro-head filled with homicidal urges. Of course the Scientific American, employing a handy giant robot of his own manufacture that he quickly fitted out with an enormous Clark Gable mask, was able to lure her back to her pillar, and then neutralize her using "superdynamic electromagnets." But it all made, to the exasperation of the janitor-narrator, an awful mess. Not only the island but the entire seaport lay in shambles. His brother janitors and sanitation workers were already overburdened cleaning up after the donnybrooks in which the super-beings regularly indulged. How would they ever manage to clean up this latest?

At that moment, an airplane landed on Liberation Island, and a familiar figure in a broad-brimmed hat and belted topcoat climbed out, looking as if she meant business.

"That looks like Eleanor Roosevelt," said Rosa, pointing to the panel in which Joe had drawn a quite flattering version of the First Lady, waving from the top step of the plane's gangplank.