The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

In that narrow bed, in that bedroom hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his grandmother’s snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley, Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape.

A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough’s three active steel mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom across the river, which came slanting in through a parting in the curtains.

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.

He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.

“Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”

Dueling wireless sets were tuned to different stations, the volumes turned up in hostile increments.

The labels seemed evidence of all the qualities his father and family were going to require to survive the ordeal to which Josef was abandoning them.

“People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”

Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only how to fake.

We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation.

If they could not move Americans to anger against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.

“There is only one sure means in life,” Deasey said, “of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity. It was only when he was settling into the back of a taxicab, or reaching for his wallet, or brushing against a chair, that there came the crinkling of paper; the flutter of a wing; the ghostly foolscap whisper from home; and for a moment he would hang his head in shame.

The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

It made him sad, not because he saw some instructive allegory or harsh sermon on the vanity of all human hopes and utopian imaginings in this translation of a bright summer dream into an immense mud puddle freezing over at the end of a September afternoon—he was too young to have such inklings—but because he had so loved the Fair, and seeing it this way, he felt in his heart what he had known all along, that, like childhood, the Fair was over, and he would never be able to visit again.

But intermingled with, secretly bubbling beneath, these other motives for the gesture was concealed a desire that had nothing to do with Thomas Kavalier. Rosa was practicing—beginning to dabble, on the walls of a boy’s bedroom, with the idea of becoming a mother.

He would think she was trying to make some horrible equivalency, when it was only one of the monstrous coincidences of life.

Regardless of what he felt for Bacon, it was not worth the danger, the shame, the risk of arrest and opprobrium. Sammy felt, that morning, with his ribs bruised and a wan flavor of chlorine at the back of his mouth, that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving.

explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.

She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.

The night he offered her the chance to draw “a comic book for dollies,” Rosa felt, Sammy had handed her a golden key, a skeleton key to her self, a way out of the tedium of her existence as a housewife and a mother, first in Midwood and now here in Bloomtown, soi-disant Capital of the American Dream.

She gave him her hand then, and he took it in his own. For an instant, his felt much drier and more callused than she remembered, and then it felt exactly the same. They sat back down at the kitchen table, in front of their plates of food.

As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

“Uh-huh. I see.” Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it sometimes, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered.

The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in these terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art.

All of the grief and black wonder that he was never able to express, before or afterward, not to a navy psychiatrist, nor to a fellow drifter in some cheap hotel near Orlando, Florida, nor to his son, nor to any of those few who remained to love him when he finally returned to the world, all of it went into the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely minced panels of his monstrous comic book.

Not only had Sammy never loved Rosa; he was not capable of loving her, except with the half-mocking, companionable affection he always had felt for her, a modest structure, never intended for extended habitation, long since buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame. It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe’s or for Rosa’s or for Tommy’s sake, but for his own: not a merely gallant gesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-immurement. Joe was appalled.

The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation.