Bookends

by Michael Chabon

  “You best get your ass downstairs!”

  “Hey, Vaughan, who’s the old guy?”

  Sammy took a step toward the boy, Vaughan, and lowered his voice.

  “They want to give you another certificate?”

  “A trophy. But I saw mine. The head was missing. I guess maybe somebody, well. Broke it off. When I saw that, that’s when I left.”

  “Come on, Vaughan!”

  “Hey,” Sam told the boys, flexing his Popeye arms, and putting as much Brooklyn into his voice as he could muster. It was, still, a decent amount. “Whyn’t you punks get the hell out of here and leave the kid alone?”

  The red mass hung a moment in the hallway, wavering like the afterimage of a bright flash on his damaged retinas. Then a moment later it was gone.

  “You ever read comic books?” Sam asked the boy.

  “Not really. Like, Archies?”

  “Archies. No, well, Archie has his place. But—”

  Sam reached a hand down and offered to help the boy to his feet.

  “Look, they got a big show going on downstairs. Cuyahoga Ballroom. A comics show. You might like it. Take Doctor Strange. He’s a magician. You’d like that one, I bet.”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “You ought to check it out.”

  He pulled the boy up and stepped away from him.

  “I’d better get back to the banquet,” the boy said.

  “Suit yourself,” Sam said. “‘Suit yourself,’ that’s good advice. I wish somebody’d given it to me when I was your age.”

  They went to the elevator and the boy pressed the button. They said nothing when it arrived and the doors opened, and nothing until they were halfway down.

  “‘Suit yourself,’” the boy repeated. “I let you out of a dark, stinky closet where you could’ve died, you give me some cheap advice.”

  Sam looked at the boy and saw that sly light in the boy’s eyes again.

  “Ten-year-olds,” Sam said, as he got out of the elevator at the Mezzanine. “God help me.” The doors started to close on the boy and his chance to redeem himself and repay his debt of freedom. He stuck his arm in and stopped them from closing. “Check out the show,” he said. “That’s my advice to you. Cheap as it may be.”

  “I can’t,” the boy said. “I really don’t think I can. But, uh, thanks.”

  “Vaughan. What’s the rest of it?”

  “Brian K. Vaughan.” It came out in a rush, a single word, almost a single syllable.

  “Uh huh. What’s the K for?”

  “Kellar.”

  “Like the magician. Self-Decapitation, right? Harry Kellar. That the guy?”

  Brian K. Vaughan looked shocked, almost put out, as if his middle initial represented a grave and powerful mystery of which he had hitherto believed himself the sole initiate.

  “Yeah,” he said wonderingly.

  Sam stepped back from the doors, and drew back his hand with a Harry Kellar flourish, and the door slid shut on Brian K. Vaughan who, having called home from a pay phone in the lobby, received permission to stay after the league banquet and attend the remainder of the Saturday session of ErieCon ’86, at which he purchased a copy of Strange Tales number 146 (featuring Baron Mordo, Dormammu, and the Ancient One), in Very Good condition, thus altering the entire course of his future life, not to mention the lives of those of us who are fortunate enough to know and appreciate the comic book genius so wildly and thoroughly on display (along with the estimable talents of Steve Rolston, Jason Alexander, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto) in the pages that follow.

  He and Sam Clay never saw or spoke to each another again. (2009)

  Summerland

  1.

  I DID BELIEVE IN FAIRIES, I DID, I DID.

  It started when I was eleven or twelve, around the time of my parents’ separation, though at the time I would not have remarked, certainly, on the coincidence. It was just another plankton bloom of the imagination, nourished and steered by the currents of the books I was reading at the time: Katherine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries, and collections of stories, like “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer,” about the Fair Folk and their ways, drawn for the most part from ballads and folk beliefs of the British Isles.

  Moving along the 398s at the local branch of the Howard County (Maryland) Public Library, I soon discovered that all over Europe and around the world, in Russia, Japan, pre-Columbian North America, Appalachia, one found accounts of human dealings with diminutive beings who came from a hidden Other World with its own freakily nonhuman way of reckoning time and morality. There appeared to be surprising agreement, across many traditions, about certain behaviors common to these beings. They coveted human babies, for one thing, though they would kidnap anyone. If their victims escaped or were released from captivity in the Other World it would be as doddering old men and women who discovered that, in their world of origin, they had been gone for only a day; or who realized, encountering their own great-grandchildren, that a century had passed since their abduction. Around the world fairies and their analogs were said to often take the form of certain recurring animals—bears, black dogs, swans, cranes—or of long-haired women who stood in flowing robes along the shore of a lake, river, or sea, wailing, singing, and luring wayfarers to their deaths. It was said, all around the world, that you might bargain with these beings, or ward them off—often they were said to fear iron—but you could not hope for mercy from them, because they had no souls.

  As the bloom spread its eddies in Julia sets across my twelve-year-old brain I decided that all this lore had a basis in reality, and that I believed in fairies.* I told myself this belief was a logical—and hardly original—inference given the universality and broad consensus of fairy reports in world culture.

  This was a lie. I believed in fairies because I wanted to believe in fairies. A belief in fairies was something I cultivated, and concealed, not because of any preponderance of evidence but simply because, for some reason, it gave me pleasure to do so. I slunk along the corridors of Ellicott City Middle School with my head down, eyes on the rubber toes of my Sears Jeepers, a fervent belief in fairies lodged secretly inside me like a tiny woodland scene tucked inside an Easter egg, a warming dram of whiskey hidden in the head of a walking stick.

  This belief, like all our most fervent beliefs, was largely a matter of will. Even as a boy wandering hopefully into a ring of toadstools in the woods behind our house in suburban Maryland, I knew perfectly well that the magic circle of mushrooms had been sketched not by the nocturnal dancing of liminal creatures but by some peculiarity of fungal generation. To see the toadstool ring as a midnight dancing circle took effort. Believing in fairies was a kind of discipline, an enforced habit of looking and listening that invested the world around me with rich and strange possibility. Children, like scientists—and, at our best moments, like writers—know that the deepest mysteries are encountered when we are paying the closest attention. I hoped that if I kept my eyes on the shady green corners of my world I might, in due time, catch a glimpse, as through a rip in an invisible curtain, of a darting, gem-eyed, feral face.

  2.

  CHILDHOOD PASSED WITHOUT AFFORDING ME, DESPITE MY vigilance, any sighting or trace of elfin passage. In my attempts to explain this failure I entertained a number of theories. Perhaps fairies had existed at one time, working their mischief for long enough and over a geographical range wide enough to have lastingly permeated human memory, until the rise of modern industrial civilization had doomed them, or driven them permanently hence. Perhaps our world and faerie, as the Other World was often styled, were dimensions of reality that had overlapped for a few millennia before separating, Venn circles that no longer intersected, soap bubbles of space-time that had briefly kissed before drifting apart. Perhaps, as many had speculated, the elves, trolls, boggarts, kobolds, and other haunters of deep woods and wild places were the dwindled remnant of aboriginal pantheons, overthrown and super
seded gods imbued by conquerors’ guilt with the transferred resentment of the conquered who had worshipped them; or perhaps tales of fairies in their caves, barrows, and desolations represented the furtive presence, distorted and embroidered upon by centuries of human memory, of those conquered aboriginals themselves, lingering in their last retreats. Picts, say, or Neanderthals, or whatever Stone Age people the lonely Basques descended from, venturing forth now and then from remote redoubts or dark bogs to steal children, animals, and food.

  As I grew into my teens, then, my belief cooled and shed an ever-dimmer light as it faded into a forlorn half-hope that fairies were something the world had lost, long before my belated appearance on the scene.* Their apparent total absence I saw as proof, or figuration, of all the glory that had passed and was always passing from the world. In my imagination fairies had shifted, as it were, from signified to signifier. Every time that happens, as Peter Pan explained to Wendy, there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.

  3.

  I WAS BORN NEAR SUNSET, AND FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER have been liable to feelings of belatedness, of having shown up just as light and fire were fading from the sky. Among my very earliest memories is one of gold-banded panatelas and perfectos ranged in ornate boxes on the shelves of a glass counter in the lobby of Ricardo’s Mexican restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona; and of knowing, without knowing how I knew, that during some vanished Age of Cigars such counters had once been commonplace in restaurant lobbies, and that this particular one, beside the Kiwanis Club gumball machine, was already, in 1966, among the last of its kind. As my hatless father waited for his change at the cash register I held on to his hand, staring into the case, awash in regret for a world and a time—of cigars, fedoras, Indian-head nickels—that I had somehow managed to lose without ever first possessing.

  In such feelings of inherited loss there is nothing unique, to me or to my generation of Americans, even though the America that we inherited—or so we have been constantly reminded, by both Right and Left, all our lives—was something poisoned, debased, fragmented, brutalized, commodified, fallen from the grace of God, distanced irretrievably from the Puritan work ethic, from small-town values, from egalitarian principles, from the can-do spirit that had rid the world of polio and fought wars for just causes against unambiguous foes, and from the shucks-ma’am Gary Cooper brand of excellence that would never step back, at the plate, to admire a home run shot sent arcing over the left-field wall into the stands. To come into consciousness of the world as a site of perpetually vanishing glory—of promise squandered, paradise spoiled, utopia unachieved—is and has always been the inheritance of every American, as the famous closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby make clear.

  Nor is this sense of belatedness—the narrator of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a bit dismissively, calls it “the aetataureate delusion”—unique to Americans; it underlies, and renders enduringly poignant, all accounts of Golden Ages, of primal innocence and of paradise lost, going back as far as the earliest books we have: to Gilgamesh and the opening chapters of Genesis.

  Perhaps the sense of belatedness is an artifact or hangover of the evolution of consciousness itself, of the descent of homo sapiens from the smooth, continuous flow of animal time into human time, discontinuous and pulsing like a watch-works with the awareness of mortality. Perhaps a child or grandchild of the first hominid to abandon the forest canopy for the forest floor looked up, one ancient African evening, at the sunlight that was fading in the treetops overhead, and felt just the way I felt when I saw those El Productos in their gaudy boxes.

  4.

  IN THE FALL OF 2000, AROUND THE TIME THAT Kavalier & Clay was published, motivated in part by the desire to try something different after the long, dense slog of writing that book, and in part by the experience of a family car trip spent listening to Jim Dale’s thrilling recording of the first Harry Potter, I determined to write a novel that would be set in an “American faerie,” an idea that had been lying in a dusty alcove of my imagination for at least twenty-five years.*

  That, at least, is the account of Summerland’s genesis that I have always given until now. Usually I have added that, after I became a father and began reading aloud to my children, hoping to make readers of them, I started looking for a good novel to read to them about baseball, hoping also to make them into baseball fans. While many fine and even wonderful baseball novels continued to be written for adults, however, the total number of fine or even semi-decent baseball novels written for children since my own boyhood seemed, when I looked around, to have remained mysteriously equal to the total number of Chicago Cubs World Series appearances since 1945.

  When I decide to write a book, my explanation would continue—this is a line I’ve used a lot of times, over the years, and not just to account for the existence of Summerland—it’s because there seems to be a small gap in the stacks, right about where you might want to shelve a hard-boiled Jewish detective novel of alternate history, say, or a novel set during the Golden Age of American comic books, or a somewhat-better-than-semi-decent baseball novel for children. This apparent gap, along with the lingering pleasurable effects of Dale’s Rowling and the hope that writing for younger readers would not only make for a nice change but might also, perhaps, take some of the inevitable pressure off Kavalier & Clay’s successor, settled the matter.

  Nearly a decade and a half on, I can see that my standard account of Summerland’s origins, while superficially factual and sincerely intended, doesn’t explain anything. The lingering pleasure of my immersion into Jim Dale’s voice and J. K. Rowling’s world does not explain why, at the end of that summer of 2000, I found myself digging up and dusting off a fragmentary idea, conceived by a thirteen-year-old, Vulcan-studying fairy-believer with amblyopia, for a book that populated latter-day America with fairies. And a near-total absence of good baseball novels for children truly does not explain why I felt that I ought to write a baseball novel about fairies, since any better-than-semi-decent baseball novel for children, even one completely devoid of fairies, would presumably have done the trick.

  My standard account also fails to explain why, having settled on this odd cocktail of subject matter, I didn’t write a book that deployed fantasy elements within the cozy confines of a familiar template, using the tropes and conventions of juvenile sports fiction the way Rowling had used the template of the classic British public-school novel (Ethan Feld and the Other-World Series?); or, conversely, why I didn’t write a pastoral, Millhauser-like baseball fairy tale about, say, a brilliant young phenom abducted into Elfland who teaches its denizens the ways of baseball (The Elves of Summer?).

  Instead, I decided to make Summerland a work of epic fantasy, a quest novel set against a backdrop of existential conflict between good and evil in a “secondary creation” (to employ the term preferred by J.R.R. Tolkien) derived from a preexisting mythology, inspired by the examples of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, and, in particular, of Susan Cooper in her The Dark Is Rising sequence of novels, childhood favorites of mine, which blended a familiar, contemporary (but never cozy) reality with Arthurian material in a way that captured, like few other modern works of fantasy, the uncanny, disturbing nature of faerie.*

  This kind of explanatory failure is routine with me and, I imagine, far more common among writers than they tend to acknowledge or that their readers tend to understand. If you publish a novel, and if people read it, it’s usually not too long before some of those people start asking you, like the parents of a teenaged shoplifter caught wearing a brand-new pair of sneakers, where you got it. The problem, at least in my case, is that most of the time, and certainly in the period immediately following a book’s completion, the only truly honest reply to such a question happens to be a phrase that I have always found to be among the hardest, of all phrases, to utter: “I don’t know.”

  I have confessed elsewhere to the shame and frustration of my lifelong struggle against being a know-it-all, a struggle in w
hich, one imagines, the words I don’t know might at times prove to be of some use. But there it is: “I don’t know” is not a congenial place for me, especially when called to account for my work by readers. I want to be helpful. I want to satisfy, even to please. I want to show that I have been paying attention. And, really—how can you work on a novel every day for a year, three years, five years, and not know how it began? To admit that would be like confessing that I don’t remember how my wife and I met (blind date, Savoy restaurant, NYC, 5/9/1992).

  The main reason that I resist professing my ignorance of a novel’s true point of origin, however, is my distaste for the way that when writers talk about writing—I’m as guilty of this as anyone—we so often indulge in what feels like a deliberate practice of mystification. The whole book just came to me, like a vision, complete. Or, I was inexplicably haunted by the image of an older man, a teacher I thought, watching a younger man, his student, standing outside in the rain with a gun to his head.* Or that perennial favorite It was like someone else was doing the talking. I was just taking dictation. Every time that happens there is a fairy, somewhere, that rolls its eyes.

  So when people ask me to explain how I came to write a book, because I am a know-it-all, and because I am at pains to avoid suggesting that I believe the sources of our ideas and inspirations lie beyond human understanding, perhaps in the mysteries of the Jungian unconscious, I can never bring myself to say, “I just really don’t know.”

  A better response, as it turns out, and one that I intend to try next time, might be How about asking me again in fifteen years? Because looking back, now, at the birth of Summerland, it seems fairly obvious why I wrote an epic fantasy novel about baseball and fairies: as a direct response to the experience of overwhelming loss.

  5.

  JUST AS THE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL SEASON OF 2000 WAS getting under way, about six months before I first began to imagine the contours of the novel that would become Summerland, my wife and I were informed of an ambiguous but possibly grave abnormality in the genes of the child she had then been carrying for seventeen weeks; an incipient boy whom we had taken to calling Rocketship,* at the suggestion of his future older brother, then two and a half.