The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

wide-set blue eyes half a candle too animated by sarcasm to pass for dreamy.

‘Forget about what you are escaping from,’ ” he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum’s. “ ‘Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.’

The Doctors Kavalier maintained exacting professional schedules and, like many busy parents, were inclined at once to neglect and indulge their children.

houris-and-candied-figs

As with many novices at the art of disguise, he could not have felt more conspicuous if he were naked or wearing a sandwich board printed with his name and intentions.

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

Finally, just as the pain in his shoulder joint was beginning to intrude on the purity of his desperation,

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

Many of them, it must be said, could not even draw a realistic picture of the admittedly complicated bodily appendage with which they hoped to make their livings.

“Fifty dollars a week. Maybe more.” “Fifty dollars!” said Ethel, her usual tone of disbelief modified, it seemed to Sammy, by a wrinkle of uncertainty, as if the very patent outrageousness of the claim might be a guarantee of its veracity.

He was looking at the owner of Empire Novelty as if all the big money Sammy had promised had been packed into the swollen carapace of Sheldon Anapol and would, at the slightest prick or tap, come pouring out in an uncontrollable green torrent.

He picked up his own portfolio and untied the strings. It was a cheap pasteboard number from Woolworth’s, like Joe’s, but battered, scraped, and carefully dented. You couldn’t sit around in some art director’s waiting room with a brand-new-looking portfolio. Everyone would know you were a tyro. Sammy had spent an entire afternoon last fall hitting his with a hammer, walking across it in a pair of his mother’s heels, spilling coffee on

The landlady, a Mrs. Waczukowski, was the widow of a gagman for the Hearst syndicate who had signed his strips “Wacky” and on his death had left her only the building, an unconcealed disdain for all cartoonists veteran or new, and her considerable share of their mutual drinking problem.

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.

It was just the clearing in which they had come to pitch the tent of their imaginations.

“He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent.”

He concentrates on the routine of the trick, the series of quick and patient stages that he knows so well; and, one by one, the necessary thoughts drive out the terrible ones.

freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

It made him impatient to be consoled, as if words of comfort lent greater credence to his fears.

The sky was as blue as the ribbon on a prize-winning lamb.

He was afraid that if he allowed himself to feel anything, it would be neither rage nor satisfaction but merely pity for the mad, dusty nullity of Carl Ebling’s one-man league.

Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. 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.

He coughed, partly to cover his discomfiture, partly to camouflage the suave rejoinder he had just been fed by the prompter crouching by the footlights of his desire, and partly because his throat had gone bone-dry.

The umbrella now does what its owner has never been able to manage, and Miss Dark goes home.

They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life.

The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs—snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge—were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, and of sadness for his possessing nothing of the ten million minutes of that black-and-white scallop-edged existence save these few proofs.

Joe felt sleep gathering around him, coiling like smoke or cotton wool about his limbs, and 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.

He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death.

He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness.

This conviction was not something rational or even seriously believed, but somehow it was there, like some early, fundamental error in his understanding of geography—that, for instance, Quebec lay to the west of Ontario—which no amount of subsequent correction or experience could ever fully erase.