The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at the World’s Fair, in which typical items of that time and place—some nylon stockings, a copy of Gone with the Wind, a Mickey Mouse drinking cup—had been buried in the ground, to be recovered and marveled at by the people of some future gleaming New York. Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him. The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered—he allowed himself to enjoy a final time—the stickiness and weight of her thigh thrown over his belly in the middle of a hot August night, her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartment on Fifth Avenue, the burble and glint of the Trout Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her cunt, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father’s house. He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him.

  When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope. He went back to Wahoo Fleer’s typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk. Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed:

  To be delivered to Mrs. Rosa Clay of Brooklyn U.S.A.

  Dear Rosa,

  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. As for the child, who can only be our son, I wish

  This time he could not think how to continue. He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much—indeed to revolve around him—could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all. The little boy’s name, and his serious, wide-eyed stare in the photograph, jabbed at some place inside Joe that was so broken and raw that he felt it as a kind of mortal danger to consider the child for very long. Since he did not plan to return alive, one way or another, from the trip to Jotunheim, he told himself that the boy was much better off without him. He made up his mind then and there, sitting at the desk of the dead captain, that in the unlikely event his plan went awry and he should find himself somehow still living at war’s end, he would never have anything to do with any of them, but in particular with this sober and fortunate American boy. He pulled the letter out of the typewriter and folded it into an envelope on which he typed the words “In the event also of my death.” He laid his envelope under that in which Captain Fleer had made his final wishes known. He tied up the packet of letters and photographs from Rosa and fed them, in a single swallow, to Wayne. Then he picked up his sleeping bag and went out to the radio shack to see if he could tune in Radio Jotunheim.

  SHANNENHOUSE SPENT A MINUTE considering the cloudless sky, the light wind from the southeast. They had had a weatherman, Brodie, but even when he had been alive, Shannenhouse had disdained his counsel, agreeing with his old friend Lincoln Ellsworth that no one could predict the weather in this place. As long as they could get the plane off the ground, they might as well go. He was complaining of bowel troubles, and Joe afterward said in his report that he noticed Shannenhouse looked a little pale, but attributed this to drink. They backed the tractor up to the ramp once again and hooked the plane to it. This time the winch performed correctly, and they got the plane up onto the surface. While Shannenhouse set to work heating the engines and readying the plane, Joe loaded on their gear. They closed up all the hatches on the buildings and took a look around at the place that had been their home for the last nine months.

  “I will be glad to get out of here,” Shannenhouse said. “I just wish we were going someplace different.”

  Joe went to the tip of the wing where Oyster was. In his haste, Shannenhouse had not done an especially good job, and the skin looked half-cured and hung a little loose and puckered over the frame. The entire airplane had a pied appearance, reddish-brown blotches of seal stitched against a background of silver-gray, as if it had been splashed with blood. Where the dog skins were, the plane looked bleached and sickly.

  “Now or never, Dopey,” said Shannenhouse. He pressed a hand to his side.

  Thirty seconds later, they were bumping and scraping over ground as jagged and shining as rock candy, and then something seemed to cup its hand underneath and bear them up. Shannenhouse let out a cowboyish yip, a little shyly.

  “Never going to know what hit him,” he shouted over the basso profundo chorusing of the big twin Cyclones.

  Joe said nothing. He never told Shannenhouse that the night before, just before he lay down in his sleeping bag, he had broken the fictitious invisible barrier that had hitherto been maintained between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, transmitting the following six words to the Geologist, in German plaintext, at one of the frequencies regularly used by Berlin to contact him:

  WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU

  He could never have prized apart to explain it to Shannenhouse the elf-knot of pity, remorse, and a desire to torment and terrify that had prompted this admonishment. In any case, it would have been superfluous to try, since on the third day of their journey, in a tent pitched on a plateau in the lee of the Eternity Mountains, Shannenhouse’s appendix burst.

  THE PIEBALD AIRPLANE, off-kilter, coughing, trailing a long black thread from her port engine, hung in the sky for a moment a hundred feet west of Jotunheim, as if her pilot doubted his eyes, as if the glyph of huddled oblong mounds in the snow, the black barbell of the radio tower, and the ice-stiffened crimson flag with its spider eye were merely others in the long string of mirages, the phantom airplanes and fata morgana fairy castles, that had bewitched him in the course of his halting and baffled flight. He paid for his moment of hesitation: his remaining engine stalled. The plane dipped, jerked upward, wobbled, then fell, in silence and with surprising slowness, like a coin dropped into a jar of water. The plane hit the ground, and with a whisper, the snow exploded. A great hood of glittering spray, kicked up by the nose of the plane as it plowed along the ground, billowed and drifted across the clearing. The sounds of splintering timbers and steel bolts shearing away were caught up and muffled in the roiling surf of snow. The silence deepened, broken only by a soft teakettle ticking and the snap of fabric as a torn section of fuselage sheathing flapped in the wind.

  A few moments later, a head appeared over the top of the rugged furrow of ice and snow that the crash landing had piled up alongside the airplane. It was hooded, the face concealed by a narrow circular ruff of wolverine fur.

  The German Geologist, whose name was Klaus Mecklenburg, and who had been emerging from his solitary quarters to watch the skies over Jotunheim at regular intervals of twenty minutes, raised his left hand, the fingers of his reindeer-skin glove outspread. The greeting had a somewhat incongruous appearance since, in his other hand, pointed loosely but generally in the direction of the pilot’s fur-trimmed head, he held a .45-caliber Walther service pistol. He had not slept at all in the five days since receiving the message that he had identified as originating from the American base in Marie Byrd Land, and had not slept well for nearly two months before that. He was drunk, jacked up on amphetamines, and suffering from the effects of a spastic colon. He kept the gun leveled at the man coming toward him over the ice, watching for other heads to appear, conscious of the tremor in his hand, aware that he might have time to get off only one or two shots before the others brought him down.

  The American had halved the hundred meters that separated them before the Geologist began to wonder if he might not have been the only survivor of the crash. He came unsteadily, dragging his right leg behind him, the opening of his hood pointed straight ahead, as if without expectation of being followed or joined. He had pulled his arms down into his coat for warmth, and with the face invisible within the fur hole of the hood and the herky-jerk scarecrow
gait, the sight of the sleeves flopping at the man’s sides unnerved the Geologist. It was as if he were being stalked by a parka filled with bones, the ghost of some failed expedition. The Geologist raised the gun, extending his arm, and aimed directly for the vapor emerging from the center of the hood. The American stopped, and his parka began to crumple and squirm as he struggled to get his arms out. He had just thrust his hands through the cuffs of his sleeves, extending his arms in a gesture of protest or supplication, when the first shot hit him at the shoulder and spun him around.

  Mecklenburg had shot at birds and squirrels as a boy but had never fired a pistol before, and his arm rang with pain, as if the cold had frozen his arm and the recoil shattered it. Quickly, before pain and fear and doubt of his actions could stop him, he squeezed off the rest of the clip. Only after he had emptied it did he realize that he had been firing with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, the American was standing directly in front of him. He pushed back the circle of fur, and his hair and eyebrows, moistened by the condensation of his breath inside the hood, began almost at once to rime over with frost. He was surprisingly young in spite of his beard, with an aquiline elegant face.

  “I am very glad to be here,” the American said in flawless German. He smiled. The smile caught for an instant as if on a sharp wire. There was a neat black hole in the shoulder of the parka. “The flight was difficult.”

  He pulled his right arm up inside the parka once more and felt around for a moment. When the hand reappeared, it was holding an automatic pistol. The American raised the gun up across his chest, as if to fire into the sky, and then his arm jerked. The Geologist took a step backward, then steeled himself, and threw himself onto the American, grabbing for the gun. As he did so, he realized that he had misinterpreted the situation, somehow, that the American had been in the act of tossing the pistol aside, that his unthreatening and even wistful air was not some elaborate ruse but merely the relief, dazed and unsteady, of someone who had survived an ordeal and was simply, as he had suggested, glad to be alive. Mecklenburg felt a sudden sharp regret for his behavior, for he was a peaceful and scholarly man who had always deplored violence, and one furthermore who liked and admired Americans, having known, in the course of his scientific career, a fair number of them. A gregarious man, he had nearly died of solitude in the last month, and now a boy had fallen out of the sky, an intelligent, able young man, one with whom he could discuss, in German no less, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman, and now Mecklenburg had shot at him—emptied his clip—in this place where the only hope for survival, as he had so long argued, was friendly cooperation among the nations.

  A chime tuned to C-sharp sounded in his ear, and with an odd sense of relief he felt his tormented bowels empty into his trousers. The American caught him in his arms, looking startled and friendless and sad. The Geologist opened his mouth and felt the bubble of his saliva freeze against his lips. What a hypocrite I have been! he thought.

  It took Joe nearly half an hour to drag the German across ten of the twenty meters that separated them from the hatch of Jotunheim. It was a terrible expense of strength and will, but he knew that he would find medical supplies inside the station, and he was determined to save the life of the man who, just five days before, he had set out across eight hundred miles of useless ice to kill. He needed benzoin, cotton wool, a hemostat, needle and thread. He needed morphia and blankets and the ruddy flame of a stout German stove. The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German’s blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him.

  INFORMAL GERMAN TERRITORIAL CLAIMS to the regions bordering the Weddell Sea had first been advanced in the wake of the Filchner expedition of 1911–13. Flying the eagle of the Hohenzollerns, the Deutschland, under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, had sailed farther south into this grievous sea than any previous ship, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impassable palisade of barrier ice. The Deutschland then turned west and sailed for more than a hundred miles, finding no break or point of ingress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner’s name; explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.

  At last, with the end of the season only a few weeks away, they came upon a place, a fissure in the Barrier, where the level of the shelf dropped abruptly to no more than a few feet above sea level. A half-dozen ice anchors were quickly driven into the shore of this inlet, which the explorers named Kaiser Wilhelm II Bay, and crates unloaded for the construction of a winter base. They chose a site some three miles inland for the erection of the hut, to which they gave the rather too-grand name of Augustaburg, and prepared to hunker down in the southernmost German colony until spring. A series of severe tremors in the ice, some lasting nearly a minute, and the subsequent calving, witnessed by the awed and deafened crew of the Deutschland, of a colossal iceberg a few miles east of the ship, put an abrupt end to their plans. After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to ship, and sailed north for home. They were almost immediately beset, and spent the winter being chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before warmer weather thawed them out and sent them limping home.

  It was in the base camp abandoned by this expedition that Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Class, was found by the navy icebreaker William Dyer. He had been in intermittent contact with the ship via a portable radio set, giving more or less accurate readings of his position. Commander Frank J. Kemp, skipper of the Dyer, noted in his log that the young man had been through considerable hardship in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only limited skill as a pilot and a dying man for a navigator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-mile hike, on a fractured ankle, to this ghost town of Augustaburg.

  He had been living in this hut, noted Commander Kemp, on thirty-year-old tins of meat and biscuits, his only company the radio and a dead penguin, perfectly preserved. He was suffering from the effects of scurvy, frostbite, anemia, and a poorly healed flesh wound, which only the Antarctic uncongeniality to microbes had prevented from becoming infected, perhaps fatally; he had also, according to the ship’s doctor who examined him, gone through two and a half thirty-year-old boxes of morphine. He said that he had set out alone across the ice from the German station, crawling the last part of the way, with no intention of getting anywhere at all, because he could not bear to be near the body of the man he had shot and killed, and had chanced upon Augustaburg just as the last of his strength was failing him. He was taken to the base at Guantánamo Bay, where he remained under psychiatric examination and investigation by a court-martial until shortly before V-E Day.

  His claim to have killed the lone enemy occupant of a German Antarctic base some seventy-five miles to the east of the hut where he was found was investigated and confirmed, and in spite of certain questions raised by his behavior and his handling of the matter, Ensign Kavalier was awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Service Cross.

  In August 1977 a huge chunk of the Filchner Shelf, forty miles wide and twenty-five miles deep, calved off from the main body and drifted north as a giant iceberg into the Weddell Sea, carrying with it both the hut and the hidden remnants, some ten miles distant, of the German polar dream. This event put an abrupt end to tourism at Augustaburg. Filc
hner’s Hut had become a required stop for the intrepid tourists who were just then beginning to brave the floe-choked waters of the Weddell Sea. The people would tramp in from out of the wind with their guide and respectfully examine the piles of empty tins with their quaint Edwardian-era labels, the abandoned charts and skis and rifles, the racks of unused beakers and test tubes, the frozen penguin, shot for examination but never dissected, standing eternal vigil under a portrait of the Kaiser. They might reflect on the endurance of this monument to a failure, or on the dignity and poignance that time can bring to human detritus, or they might merely wonder if the peas and gooseberries in the neat rows of cans on the shelves were still edible, and how they might taste. A few would linger a moment longer, puzzling over an enigmatic drawing that lay on the workbench, done in colored pencil, frozen solid and somewhat the worse from long-ago folding and refolding. Clearly the work of a child, it appeared to show a man in a dinner jacket falling from the belly of an airplane. Although the man’s parachute was far beyond his reach, the man was smiling, and pouring a cup of tea from an elaborate plummeting tea service, as if oblivious of his predicament, or as if he thought he had all the time in the world before he would hit the ground.