The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  After the magician had reinstalled himself, coatless now, in his dark box, Mrs. Houdini asked if she might not prevail upon the kindness and forbearance of their host for the evening to bring her husband a glass of water. It had been an hour, after all, and as anyone could see, the closeness of the cabinet and the difficulty of Houdini’s exertions had taken a certain toll. The sporting spirit prevailed; a glass of water was brought, and Mrs. Houdini carried it to her husband. Five minutes later, Houdini stepped from the cabinet for the last time, brandishing the cuffs over his head like a loving cup. He was free. The crowd suffered a kind of painful, collective orgasm—a “Krise,” Kornblum called it—of delight and relief. Few remarked, as the magician was lifted onto the shoulders of the referees and notables on hand and carried through the theater, that his face was convulsed with tears of rage, not triumph, and that his blue eyes were incandescent with shame.

  “It was in the glass of water,” Joe guessed, when he had managed to free himself at last from the far simpler challenge of the canvas sack and a pair of German police cuffs gaffed with buckshot. “The key.”

  Kornblum, massaging the bands of raw skin at Joe’s wrists with his special salve, nodded at first. Then he pursed his lips, thinking it over, and finally shook his head. He stopped rubbing at Joe’s arms. He raised his head, and his eyes, as they did only rarely, met Joe’s.

  “It was Bess Houdini,” he said. “She knew her husband’s face. She could read the writing of failure in his eyes. She could go to the man from the newspaper. She could beg him, with the tears in her eyes and the blush on her bosom, to consider the ruin of her husband’s career when put into the balance with nothing more on the other side than a good headline for the next morning’s newspaper. She could carry a glass of water to her husband, with the small steps and the solemn face of the wife. It was not the key that freed him,” he said. “It was the wife. There was no other way out. It was impossible, even for Houdini.” He stood up. “Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.” He wiped at his raw cheek with the back of his hand, on the verge, Joe felt, of sharing some parallel example of liberation from his own life.

  “Have you—did you ever—?”

  “That terminates the lesson for today,” Kornblum said, snapping shut the lid of the box of ointment, and then managing to meet Joe’s eyes again, not, this time, without a certain tenderness. “Now, go home.”

  Afterward, Joe found there was some reason to doubt Kornblum’s account. The famous London Mirror handcuff challenge had taken place, he learned, at the Hippodrome, not the Palladium, and in 1904, not 1906. Many commentators, Joe’s chum Walter B. Gibson among them, felt that the entire performance, including the pleas for light, water, time, a cushion, had been arranged beforehand between Houdini and the newspaper; some even went so far as to argue that Houdini himself had designed the cuffs, and that he had coolly whiled away his time of purported struggling in his cabinet, Kornblum-like, by reading the newspaper or by humming contentedly along with the orchestra down in the pit.

  Nevertheless, when he saw Tommy step out onto the tallest rooftop in the city, wearing a small, horrified smile, Joe felt the passionate, if not the factual, truth behind Kornblum’s dictum. He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orchestra of air currents and violin winds, the trumpeting of foghorns and melancholy steamships, the plangent continuo of passing DC-3s. Like Harry Houdini, Joe had failed to get out of his self-created trap; but now the love of a boy had sprung him, and drawn him at last, blinking, before the footlights.

  “It’s a stunt!” cried an old blond trooper whom Joe recognized as Harley, chief of the building police force.

  “It’s a gimmick,” said a thickset, younger man standing beside Sammy. A plainclothesman, by the look of him. “Is that what it is?”

  “It’s a great big pain in the ass,” Harley said.

  Joe was shocked to see how haggard Sammy’s face had grown; he was pale as dough, and at thirty-two he seemed to have acquired at last the deep-set eyes of the Kavaliers. He had not changed much, and yet somehow he looked entirely different. Joe felt as if he were looking at a clever impostor. Then Rosa’s father emerged from the observatory. With his dyed penny-red hair and the eternal youthfulness of cheek enjoyed by some fat men, he did not appear to have changed at all, though he was, for some reason, dressed like George Bernard Shaw.

  “Hello, Mr. Saks,” Joe said.

  “Hello, Joe.” Saks was relying, Joe noticed, on a silver-topped walking stick, in a way that suggested the cane was not (or not merely) an affectation. So that was one change. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you,” Joe said. “And you?”

  “We are well,” he said. He was the only person on the entire deck—children included—who looked entirely delighted by the sight of Joe Kavalier, standing on the high shoulder of the Empire State Building in a suit of blue long johns. “Still steeped in scandal and intrigue.”

  “I’m glad,” Joe said. He smiled at Sammy. “You’ve put on weight?”

  “A little. For Christ’s sake, Joe. What are you doing standing up there?”

  Joe turned his attention to the boy who had challenged him to do this, to stand here at the tip of the city in which he had been buried. Tommy’s face was nearly expressionless, but it was riveted on Joe. He looked as if he was having a hard time believing what he saw. Joe shrugged elaborately.

  “Didn’t you read my letter?” he said to Sammy.

  He threw out his arms behind him. Hitherto he had approached this stunt with the dry dispassion of an engineer, researching it, talking it over with the boys at Tannen’s, studying Sidney Radner’s secret monograph on Hardeen’s abortive but thrilling Paris Bridge Leap of 1921.* Now, to his surprise, he found himself aching to fly.

  “It said you were going to kill yourself,” Sammy said. “It didn’t say anything about doing a Human Yo-Yo act.”

  Joe lowered his arms; it was a good point. The problem, of course, was that Joe had not written the letter. Had he done so, he would not have promised, in all likelihood, to commit public suicide in a moth-eaten costume. He recognized the idea as his own, of course, filtered through the wildly elaborating imagination that, more than anything else—more than the boy’s shock of black hair or delicate hands or guileless gaze, haunted by tenderness of heart and an air of perpetual disappointment—reminded Joe of his dead brother. But he had felt it necessary, in fulfilling the boy’s challenge, to make a few adjustments here and there.

  “The possibility of dying is small,” Joe said, “but it is of course there.”

  “And it’s just about the only way for you to avoid arrest, Mr. Kavalier,” said the plainclothesman.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Joe said. He threw his arms back again.

  “Joe!” Sammy ventured a hesitant couple of inches toward Joe. “God damn it, you know damn well the Escapist doesn’t fly!”

  “That’s what I said,” said one of the orphans knowledgeably.

  The policemen exchanged a look. They were getting ready to rush the parapet.

  Joe stepped backward into the air. The cord sang, soaring to a high, bright C. The air around it seemed to shimmer, as with heat. There was a sharp twang, and they heard a brief, muffled smack like raw meat on a butcher block, a faint groan. The descent continued, the cord drawing thinner, the knots pulling farther apart, the note of elongation reaching into the dog frequencies. Then there was silence.

  “Ow!” Captain Harley slapped the back of his head as if a bee had stung him. He looked up, then down, then jumped quickly to one side. Everybody looked at his feet. There, to one side, wobbly and distended, lay the elastic cord, tipped by the severed loop that had engirdled Joe Kavalier’s che
st.

  All warnings and prohibitions were forgotten. The children and adults ran to the parapet, and those lucky or industrious enough to get themselves up onto it peered down at the man lying spread-eagled, a twisted letter K, on the projecting roof-ledge of the eighty-fourth floor.

  The man lifted his head.

  “I’m all right,” he said. Then he lowered his head once more to the gray pebbled surface onto which he had fallen, and closed his eyes.

  * The Paris Bridge-Leap of 1921: A Memoir of Hardeen, New York; privately printed, 1935. Now in the collection of Prof. Kenneth Silverman.

  THE BEARERS CARRIED HIM DOWN to the subterranean garage of the building, where an ambulance had been waiting since four o’clock that afternoon. Sammy rode down with them in the elevator, having left Tommy with his grandfather and the captain of the building police, who would not permit the boy to ride along. Sammy was a little hesitant about leaving Tommy, but it seemed crazy just to let Joe be taken away again like that, not ten minutes after his reappearance. Let the boy spend a few minutes in the hands of the police; maybe it would do him good.

  Every time Joe shut his eyes, the bearers told him rather curtly to wake up. They were afraid that he might have a concussion.

  “Wake up, Joe,” Sammy told him.

  “I am awake.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” Joe said. He had bit his lip, and there was blood from it on his cheek and shirt collar. It was the only blood that Sammy could see. “How are you?”

  Sammy nodded.

  “I read Weird Date every month,” Joe said. “It’s very good writing, Sam.”

  “Thanks,” Sammy said. “Praise means so much when it comes from a lunatic.”

  “Sea Yarns is also good.”

  “Think so?”

  “I always learn something about boats or something.”

  “I do a lot of research.” Sammy took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the bloody spot on Joe’s lip, remembering the days of Joe’s war against the Germans of New York. “It’s all in my face, by the way,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “The weight you mentioned. It’s all in my face. I still swing the dumbbells every morning. Feel my arm.”

  Joe raised his arm, wincing a little, and gave Sammy’s biceps a squeeze.

  “Big,” Joe said.

  “You don’t look so swell yourself, you know. In this ratty old getup.”

  Joe smiled. “I was hoping Anapol would see me in it. It was going to be like a bad dream coming true.”

  “I have a feeling a lot of his bad dreams are about to come true,” Sammy said. “When did you take it, anyway?”

  “Two nights ago. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind. I realize that it … has sentimental value for you.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything special to me.”

  Joe nodded, watching his face, and Sammy looked away.

  “I’d like a cigarette,” Joe said.

  Sammy fished one out of his jacket and stuck it between Joe’s lips.

  “I’m sorry,” Joe said.

  “Are you?”

  “About Tracy, I mean. I know it was a long time ago but I …”

  “Yeah,” Sammy said. “Everything was a long time ago.”

  “Everything I’m sorry about, anyway,” Joe said.

  THE VIEW OUT THE WINDOWS was pure cloud bank, a gray woolen sock pulled down over the top of the building. On the walls of Joe’s strange apartment hung sketches of the head of a rabbi, a man with fine features and a snowy white beard. The studies were tacked up with pushpins, and they depicted this noble-looking gentleman in a variety of moods: rapturous, commanding, afraid. There were fat books on the tables and chairs; thick reference volumes and tractates and dusty surveys: Joe had been doing a little research himself. Sammy saw, stacked neatly in a corner, the wooden crates in which Joe had always kept his comics—only there were ten times as many as he remembered. Over the room lay the smell of long occupation by a solitary man: burned coffee, hard sausage, dirty linens.

  “Welcome to the Bat Cave,” Lieber said when Sammy came in.

  “Actually,” Longman Harkoo said, “it’s apparently known as the Chamber of Secrets.”

  “Is it?” Sammy said.

  “Well, uh, that’s what I call it,” said Tommy, coloring. “But not really.”

  You came into the Chamber of Secrets from a small anteroom that had been painstakingly decorated to simulate the reception area of a small but going concern. It had a steel desk and typist’s table, an armchair, a filing cabinet, a telephone, a hat stand. On the desk stood a nameplate promising the daily presence behind it of a Miss Smyslenka, and a vase of dried flowers, and a photograph of Miss Smyslenka’s grinning baby, played by a six-month-old Thomas E. Clay. On the wall was a large commercial painting of a sturdy-looking factory, luminous in the rosy glow of a New Jersey morning, chimneys trailing pretty blue smoke. KORNBLUM VANISHING CREAMS, read the engraved label affixed to the bottom of the frame, HO-HO-KUS, NEW JERSEY.

  No one, not even Tommy, was quite sure how long Joe had been living in the Empire State Building, but it was clear that during this time he had been working very hard and reading a lot of comic books. On the floor stood ten piles of Bristol board, every sheet in each pile covered in neat panels of pencil drawings. At first Sammy was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of pages—there must have been four or five thousand—to look very closely at any of them, but he did notice that they seemed to be uninked. Joe had been working in a variety of gauges of lead, letting his pencils do the tricks of light and mass and shadow that were usually pulled off with ink.

  In addition to the rabbis, there were studies of organ-grinders, soldiers in breastplates, a beautiful girl in a headscarf, in various attitudes and activities. There were buildings and carriages, street scenes. It didn’t take Sammy long to recognize the spiky elaborate towers and crumbling archways of what must be Prague, lanes of queer houses huddled in the snow, a bridge of statues casting a broken moonlit shadow on a river, twisting alleyways. The characters, for the most part, appeared to be Jews, old-fashioned, black-garbed, drawn with all of Joe’s usual fluidity and detail. The faces, Sammy noticed, were more specific, quirkier, uglier, than the lexicon of generic comic book mugs that Joe had learned and then exploited in all his old work. They were human faces, pinched, hungry, the eyes anticipating horror but hoping for something more. All except for one. One character, repeated over and over in the sketches on the walls, had barely any face at all, the conventional V’s and hyphens of a comic physiognomy simplified to almost blank abstraction.

  “The Golem,” Sammy said.

  “Apparently he was writing a novel,” Lieber said.

  “He was,” Tommy said. “It’s all about the Golem. Rabbi Judah Ben Beelzebub scratched the word ‘truth’ into his forehead and he came to life. And one time? In Prague? Joe saw the real Golem. His father had it in a closet in their house.”

  “It really does look marvelous,” Longman said. “I can’t wait to read it.”

  “A comic book novel,” Sammy said. He thought of his own by-now legendary novel, American Disillusionment, that cyclone which, for years, had woven its erratic path across the flatlands of his imaginary life, always on the verge of grandeur or disintegration, picking up characters and plotlines like houses and livestock, tossing them aside and moving on. It had taken the form, at various times, of a bitter comedy, a stoical Hemingwayesque tragedy, a hard-nosed lesson in social anatomy like something by John O’Hara, a bare-knuckles urban Huckleberry Finn. It was the autobiography of a man who could not face himself, an elaborate system of evasion and lies unredeemed by the artistic virtue of self-betrayal. It had been two years now since his last crack at the thing, and until this very instant he would have sworn that his ancient ambitions to be something more than the hack scribbler of comic books for a fifth-rate house were as dead, as the saying went, as vaudeville. “My God.”

  “Come on, Mr. Clay,�
�� Lieber said. “You can ride over to the hospital with me.”

  “Why are you going to the hospital?” Sammy said, though he knew the answer.

  “Well, I feel pretty strongly that I have to arrest him. I hope you understand.”

  “Arrest him?” Longman said. “What for?”

  “Disturbing the peace, I suppose. Or maybe we’ll get him for illegal habitation. I’m sure the building is going to want to press charges. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out on the way over.”

  Sammy saw his father-in-law’s smirk shrink down to a hard little button, and his generally genial blue eyes went dead and glassy. It was an expression Sammy had seen before, on the floor of Longman’s gallery,* when he was dealing with a painter who overvalued his own work or some lady with a title and most of a dead civet around her shoulders, who was better equipped with money than judgment. Rosa called it, in reference to her father’s origins in retail, “his rug-merchant stare.”