The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

his heart smacking against his ribs like a bumblebee at a window.

He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant.

At that instant, the steady northerly wind that had been harrying the clouds over New York City all day succeeded at last in scattering them, sweeping clear over Chelsea a patch of wispy blue. A shaft of yellow sunlight slanted down, twisting with ribbons of vapor and smoke, a drizzling ribbon of honey, a seam of yellow quartz marbling the featureless gray granite of the afternoon.

It was then that Max, who had never before in all this time considered the matter, realized that all men, no matter what their estate, were in possession of shining immortal souls.

They were at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, in a boisterous cloud of light and people, and Sammy said to hold on a minute.

“And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said. “We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.” “Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him. “Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.

Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman—Will

But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man.

Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.

Her eyes shone, an indeterminate color between champagne and the green of a dollar. Joe felt feverish and a little dizzy, and

the cool talcum smell of Shalimar she gave off was like a guardrail he could lean against.

Joe felt the familiar exultation, the epinephrine flame that burned away doubt and confusion and left only a pure, clear, colorless vapor of rage. He took a deep breath and turned his back on the man.*

Like a diver, she rises slowly to the surface of the city.

he fought against it for a few minutes with an agreeable sense of struggle, as a child in a swimming pool might attempt to stand buoyed atop a football.

“I’m tired of fighting, maybe, for a little while. I fight, and I am fighting some more, and it just makes me have less hope, not more. I need to do something …

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.

Bacon looked at him, eyes wide, incredulous, and Sammy blushed;

it was exactly what his mother would have said.

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.

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.

It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age.

then fell, in silence and with surprising slowness, like a coin dropped into a jar of water. The

He laid his head back against his cousin’s flat stomach and looked up at his inverted face. Joe’s eyes looked bewildered, regretful, troubled; but Tommy had once read in a book on optical illusions that all faces looked sad when viewed upside down.

The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and

“I forget every day,” Joe said. He tried to smile. “You know? Days go by, and I don’t remember not to forget.”

Sammy could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to live through a day that was not fueled or deformed by a lie.