The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  He woke up a few hours later. It was still night outside the window, without a trace of morning. He ached in his joints and his chest, his lungs, burned as if he had been breathing smoke or poison. He felt hollow and flattened and quite unable to cry.

  “She’s coming,” said his aunt. She was standing in the doorway to the room, outlined in wan blue light by the fixture over the kitchen sink. “I called her. She was out of her mind worrying.”

  Joe sat up, and rubbed his face, and nodded. He wanted nothing to do with Rosa, with Sammy, with his aunt or his parents or anyone who could tie him, through any bond of memory or affection or blood, to Thomas. But he was too tired to do anything about it, and he had, in any case, no idea of what he should do. His aunt found him some old clothes, and he dressed quickly in the polar light from the sink. The clothes were much too small, but they were dry and would do until he could change them. While they waited for Rosa, she made another pot of coffee, and they sat in silence, sipping at their cups. Three quarters of an hour later, with a trembling, all but invisible hint of blue light in the air, there was the sound of a car horn from the street below. He washed out his coffee cup, laid it in the drying rack, wiped his hands on the towel, and kissed his aunt goodbye.

  Ethel hurried to the window, in time to see the girl step out of a taxicab. She threw her arms around him, and Joe held on to her for so long that Ethel found herself regretting, with an intensity that surprised her, that she had neglected to take her nephew into her arms. It seemed just then to be the worst mistake she had ever made in her life. She watched Joe and Rosa get into the taxi and drive away. Then she sat down in a chair, with its festive pattern of pineapples and bananas, and covered her face with her hands.

  JOE AND ROSA crawled into her bed at six-thirty in the morning, and she held on to him until he fell asleep, lying there, the unknown mysterious product of their love growing in the space between them. Then she slept herself. When she woke, it was past two o’clock in the afternoon, and Joe was gone. She looked in the bathroom, then went downstairs to the black kitchen, where her father was standing with the most peculiar expression on his face.

  “Where’s Joe?” she said.

  “He left.”

  “Left? Where did he go?”

  “Well, he said something about enlisting in the navy,” said her father. “But I don’t imagine he’ll be able to do that until tomorrow.”

  “The navy? What are you talking about?”

  That was how she learned of the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor. According to her father, it was very likely that the United States would soon find itself at war with Germany, too. That was what Joe was banking on.

  The doorbell played its weird tune, Raymond Scott’s shortest composition, “Fanfare for the Fuller Brush Man.” She ran to the door, certain that it was going to be Joe. It was Sammy; he looked as if he had been in a fight. There were abrasions on his cheek and a cut by his eye. Had he been fighting with Bacon? She knew that Sammy was supposed to have left with his friend for Los Angeles today—she and Joe had planned originally to go down to the train station and see them off. Had the two men quarreled? A guy of Bacon’s size might be dangerous, though it was difficult to imagine him doing anything to hurt Sammy. She noticed the frayed seam of the right sleeve of Sammy’s shirt, where it met the shoulder.

  “Your shirt is torn,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I tore it. That’s what you do when you’re, you know. In mourning.” Rosa had a dim memory of this custom from some long-ago funeral of a great-uncle. The widowed great-aunt had also covered all the mirrors in the house with dish towels, giving the place a disturbing air of having been blinded.

  “Want to come in?” she said. “Joe’s not here.”

  “Not really,” Sammy said. “Yeah, I know. I saw him.”

  “You saw him?”

  “He came by the apartment to get his things. I guess he woke me up. I guess I had kind of a rough night last night.”

  “Here,” she said, sensing an odd note in his voice. She grabbed an old sweater of her father’s from the hat stand, put it around her, and stepped out into the courtyard. It was good to get out into the cold air. She felt some order being restored to her thoughts. “Are you all right?” she said. She noticed that he winced when she touched him, as if his arm or his shoulder were sore. “What’s the matter with your arm?”

  “Nothing, I hurt it.”

  “How?”

  “Playing football on the beach, how else?”

  They sat down on the stone steps, side by side.

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He’s gone. He left.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked him. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a train for Hollywood? Where’s Bacon?”

  “I told him to go ahead without me,” Sammy said.

  “Oh?”

  He shrugged. “I never really wanted … I don’t know. I think I got a little carried away with the whole thing.”

  That morning, at Penn Station, Sammy had said goodbye to Tracy Bacon, in the compartment that had been reserved for them both aboard the Broadway Limited.

  “I don’t understand,” Bacon said. They were awkward and clumsy with each other, in the closeness of the first-class compartment, a couple of men, one so intent on not touching the other, the second devoting each movement and gesture to not being touched, that their careful maintenance of a charged and shifting distance between them had itself been a kind of bleak contact. “You didn’t even get arrested. Jimmy’s lawyers are going to make the whole thing go away.”

  Sammy shook his head. They were sitting opposite each other on the twin upholstered banquettes, which they would have, somewhere around Fostoria that night, unfolded into a pair of beds.

  “I just can’t do it anymore, Bake,” Sammy said. “It’s just—I don’t want to be like this.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “I think I do.”

  Bacon had gotten up, then, and crossed the three feet of space between them, and sat down on the banquette beside Sammy.

  “I don’t believe that,” he said, reaching for Sammy’s hand. “Something like you and me is not a question of choosing or not choosing. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Sammy jerked his hand away. 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. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.

  “Just watch me,” he said.

  In his haste to exit the compartment before Bacon could see him break down, he had collided with an elderly woman making her way down the corridor, and reopened the nasty cut over his eye.

  “I’m glad you’re still here,” Rosa said now. “Sammy, listen to me. I need help.”

  “I’ll help you. What is it?”

  “I think I need to get an abortion.”

  Sammy lit a cigarette and smoked half of it before he replied. “Joe is the father,” he said.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “And you told him and he said?”

  “I didn’t tell him. How could I tell him? Last night he tried to kill himself.”

  “He did?”

  “I think he did.”

  “But Rosa, you know, he’s joining the navy, he said.”

  “Right.”

  “He’s just going to go off and enlist in the navy without knowing that you are pregnant with his baby.”

  “Also right.”

  “Even though you’ve known about this for …”

  “Say a week.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him? Really, I mean.”

  “I was afraid,” said Rosa. “Really.”

  “Afraid that what? No, I know,” he said. He s
ounded almost bitter about it. “That he would just tell you to get the thing. And not want to marry you.”

  “There you have it.”

  “And now you—”

  “Just couldn’t possibly ever, in a million years, tell him.”

  “Because he would certainly tell you—”

  “Right. He wants to go kill them, Sam. I don’t think anything I tell him could stop him now.”

  “So now you have to—”

  “As I was trying to explain.”

  Sammy turned to look at her, his eyes bright, wild with an idea that Rosa grasped at once, in all its depths and particulars, in all the fear and hopelessness on which it fed.

  “I get you,” he said.

  THE LOSER AT Lupe Velez was obliged to make his bed in the tunnels, out in the pandemonium of Dog-town. There were eighteen dogs, Alaskan malamutes for the most part, with a few odd Labrador and Greenland huskies and one unreliable skulker that was nearly all wolf. You took a sleeping bag and a blanket and, as often as not, a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, and bedded down in the frozen tunnel where, in spite of the snow floor and snow walls and ceiling of snow, the stench of urine, harness leather, and rancid, seal-greased black husky lip was surprisingly lively. They had started out with twenty-seven dogs, enough for two main teams and a team to spare, but four of them had been torn apart by their fellows out of some complex canine emotion composed of boredom, rivalry, and appalling high spirits; one had fallen into a bottomless hole in the ice; two had come down with something as mysterious as it was swift; one had been shot by the signalman, Gedman, for reasons that remained poorly understood; and Stengel, the true genius among the dogs, had wandered off into the fog one day when no one was looking and never come back. There were twenty-two men. They played poker, Parcheesi, chess, cribbage, hearts, go fish, geography, ghost, Ping-Pong, twenty questions, dime hockey, sock hockey, bottle-cap hockey, contract bridge, checkers, liar’s dice, Monopoly, and Uncle Wiggily for cigarettes (they had as little use for money as for shovels and snow). They played to win exemption from the nasty work of chipping away with an ice chisel at the frozen ziggurat that mounted endlessly in the latrines, a pillar of turdsicles and of diarrhea plumes arrested by the cold into fantastic shapes out of Gaudi. Or they played (at chess in particular) for the treasured prize of reducing one another to little piles of ash and embers. But the winners at Lupe Velez won only the right to sleep in their bunks, warm and dry inside the Antarctic Waldorf, for one more night. It was a stupid, cruel, but at the same time forgiving game, and easy to play. There were always twenty-one winners at Lupe Velez and only one loser, and he had to go lie down with the dogs. Though in theory, given the essentially random and unskilled nature of play, they were all at an equal disadvantage, usually the one bedded down in the chaos and smell of the tunnels at the end of the evening, after a brisk inning of Lupe Velez, was Joe Kavalier. He was in there, tucked right into a crate alongside the dog called Oyster, the night that something went wrong with the Waldorf’s stove.

  Apart from the pilot Shannenhouse, there was not a man among them past the age of thirty-five (the first day the thermometer dipped below −20°F had occurred on the thirty-fifth birthday of their captain, Walter “Wahoo” Fleer, who marked the occasion by sprinting fifty yards from the Blubberteria to the Mess Hall, clad only in his mukluks), and three of the Seabees, Po, Mitchell, and Madden, were barely out of their teens, which probably went some way to explaining the essentially boyish stupidity of Lupe Velez. They would all be crammed into the Mess Hall, at once hours and weeks into the night, wasting time or doing something that pretended not to be wasting time or, in sober, intense bursts, being absorbed in some unavoidable and urgent business of repair, analysis, planning, or navy discipline, when somebody—often enough Gedman, though anyone could start a round—would call out the name of the star of Mexican Spitfire and Honolulu Lu. Immediately everyone in the room was obliged, according to the rules, to follow suit. Whoever was judged, by general determination of the players, to have uttered the critical words last (unless it was his turn on watch), spent that night (what they called night; it was all night) in Dog-town. If, through duty or good fortune, you chanced not to be in the room at the time, you were exempted. Play, except in the case of extreme tedium, was limited to one round per day. These were the rules of the game. Its origins were obscure, its conduct passionate. But for whatever reason, Joe could not seem to master it.

  There were among the men a number of theories to account for this or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to account for Joe. Joe was a favorite with all the men, liked even by those who liked no one else, of which, as the winter night dragged on, there came to be more than a few. His sleight-of-hand and magic tricks were endlessly renewable sources of entertainment, particularly to the simpler-minded at Kelvinator Station. He was reliable, adept, resourceful, and industrious, but his accented and oddly skewed language softened the edges of his evident competence, the latter a quality that, in the other talented men of Kelvinator, could take on an aggressive, antagonistic sharpness. Furthermore, it was known, though Joe had said little about it, that he had, in some ways, a more personal stake than any of them in the outcome of the war. He was in many ways the man of mystery among them. Those who had known him since training days at Greenland Station spread the word that he never read his mail, that in his footlocker was a stack of unopened letters three inches thick. To men for whom correspondence was a kind of addiction, this made him the object of considerable awe.

  Some said that Joe’s weakness at Lupe Velez was due to his incomplete grasp of English, though the obvious rebuttal here was that several of the native speakers were considerably worse off in this regard than Joe. Others blamed the remote, dreamy aspect of his personality, as obvious to them as it had been to any of his friends in New York, even here in a place against which, it might be imagined, any lesser remoteness ought to have sunk into low relief. Then there were those who claimed that he just preferred the company of dogs. There was something to all of these explanations, though the last was the sole one that Joe would admit to.

  He was generally fond of the dogs, but the one he had true feelings for was Oyster. Oyster was a gray-brown mongrel with the thick coat of an Eskimo dog, large ears inclined to undistinguished flopping, and a stout, baffled expression that suggested, said the dog men, a recent influence of Saint Bernard in his bloodlines. Earlier mistreatment with the lash during his first career in Alaska had blinded his left eye, leaving it the milky blue-white pearl that gave him his name. The very first time that Joe had been condemned to Dog-town for the night by a loss at Lupe Velez, he had noticed Oyster, way down in his niche at the very end of the sparkling tunnel, seeming to beckon to him, sitting up and laying his ears back in a pitiful way. The dogs were all desperately lonely for human companionship (they seemed to despise one another). But Joe had chosen to lie alone that night in a small bare patch at the door to a storeroom, away from the perpetual growling and muttering of the dogs.

  Then, in mid-March, a food cache that they had neglected to get into the storehouse had been lost in the first great blizzard of the winter. Joe pitched in to help find it. He went on skis, for only the third time in his life, and soon was separated from the others in the party out searching for the lost ton of food. A sudden wind blew up, suspending him in an impenetrable gauze of snow dust. Blind and frantic, he had skied into a haycock and fallen, with a sound of chimes and splintering rafters, through the ice. It was Oyster, driven by ancestral Bernardine impulses, who had found him. After that, Joe and Oyster had become semiregular bedmates, according to the vagaries of Lupe Velez. Even when he slept in his bunk, Joe visited Oyster every day, bringing him hunks of bacon and ham and the dried apricots to which the dog was partial. Apart from the two dog men, Casper and Houk, who viewed the dogs as a coach viewed his linemen, as Diaghilev his corps, as Satan his devils, Joe was the only denizen of Kelvinator Station who did not find the animals merely an ill-smelling, loud, and pe
rpetual source of annoyance.

  It was only because he had lost so often at Lupe Velez and had, as a consequence, slept with the dog so many times, that Joe became aware, even deep in his own poisoned sleep, of an alteration in the usual pattern of Oyster’s breathing.

  The change, an absence of the dog’s usual low, steady, grumbling wheeze, disturbed him. He stirred and woke just enough to become aware of an unfamiliar buzzing sound, faint and steady, in the dog tunnel. It droned on comfortingly for some time, and in his groggy state, Joe very nearly fell back into a slumber that undoubtedly would have been final. He sat up, slowly, on one arm. He could not seem to focus his thoughts, as if a gauzy curtain of snow dust hung and floated across the inside of his skull. He could not see very well, either, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes. After a moment it occurred to him that the sudden motion of his sitting up ought to have awakened at least his bedmate, who was always finely attuned to the least of Joe’s movements; and yet Oyster slept on, silent, the rise and fall of his grizzled flank shallow and slow. That was when Joe realized that the buzz he had been contentedly listening to in the warmth of his sleeping bag for who knew how long was the chilly hum of the electric lights that were strung at intervals along the tunnels. It was a sound he had never heard, not once, in all his nights in Dog-town, because the ordinary wailing and termagancy of the dogs drowned it out. But now Dog-town was completely silent.

  He reached out and slapped Oyster, gently, on the back of his head, then poked a finger into the soft flesh where his left foreleg met his body. The dog stirred, and Joe thought he might have whimpered softly, but he did not raise his head. His limbs were slack. Joe, feeling very wobbly, crawled out of the crate and went on his hands and knees across the tunnel to check on Forrestal, Casper’s pure-breed malamute, who had succeeded lost Stengel as Dog King. He saw now why rubbing his eyes had done no good: the tunnel was full of fog, curling and billowing down from the Main Stem. Forrestal did not respond at all when Joe patted him, or poked him, or shook him hard, once. Joe lowered his ear to the animal’s chest. There was no discernible heartbeat.