The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation.

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

But he’s a terribly stubborn man. I’ve never known a genius who was not.”

Sammy had backed quickly out of the kitchen and come looking for Joe; he felt that he wanted to leave, right away. He knew about homosexuality, of course, as an idea, without ever having really connected it to human emotion; certainly never to any emotion of his own. It had never occurred to him that two men, even homosexual men, might kiss in that way. He had assumed, to the degree he had ever permitted himself to give it any thought at all, that the whole thing must be a matter of blow jobs in dark alleyways or the foul practices of love-starved British sailors. But those men with the neckties and mustaches—they had been kissing the way people kissed in the movies, with care and vigor and just a hint of showiness. One fellow had caressed the other’s cheek.

The burst of guilt that lit up the radiant nerves of his solar plexus when he handled or suddenly remembered the unopened letter was every bit as intense, he was sure, as whatever he would feel upon tearing its fragile seal and letting out the usual gray compound of bad dreams and pigeon feathers and soot.

whether the advantage gained in time would have precipitated an earlier victory; whether that victory coming a day or a week or a month earlier would have sufficed to preserve a dozen or a hundred or a thousand more lives; such questions now can have only an academic poignancy, as both the ghosts and those haunted by them are dead.

of his boyfriend.

Sammy still refused to admit to himself—at that irrelevant, senatorial level of consciousness where the questions that desire has already answered are proposed and debated and tabled till later—that he was in love, or falling in love, with Tracy Bacon.

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,” Joe said. “I don’t know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But—thank you.” “For what?” “I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don’t deserve to have a friend like you.” “Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I’m such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn’t want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew.” “Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew.” “It’s that simple.”

The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

“Well … actually … I don’t know, I’m just talking off the top of my head. This is just so good. It makes me want to … make something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of.” “You can be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along.” “What do you mean, all along, you’ve been gone since Pearl Harbor.” “In my mind.” “No wonder I didn’t get the message.”

“You were frustrated,” Sammy said. “You wanted to get your hands on some real Germans.” Joe didn’t say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy. “Huh,” he said finally. “You killed Germans?” “One,” Joe said. “It was an accident.” “Did you—did it make you feel—” “It made me feel like the worst man in the world.”

“I forget every day,” Joe said. He tried to smile. “You know? Days go by, and I don’t remember not to forget.” “You just keep your money,” Sammy said gently. “I don’t need to own Empire Comics. That’s the last thing I need.” “I … I couldn’t. Sammy, I wish that I could, but I couldn’t.” “I get it, Joe,” Sammy said. “You just hold on to your money.”

these were all things that he was never going to see again. The thought was banal, and yet somehow, as happened every now and then, it took him by surprise and profoundly disappointed him. It was absurd, but underlying his experience of the world, at some deep Precambrian

stratum, was the expectation that someday—but when?—he would return to the earliest chapters of his life. It was all there—somewhere—waiting for him. He would return to the scenes of his childhood, to the breakfast table of the apartment off the Graben, to the Oriental splendor of the locker room at the Militär-und Civilschwimmschule; not as a tourist to their ruins, but in fact; not by means of some enchantment, but simply as a matter of course. 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,