The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

by Michael Chabon

  I would like to thank the MacDowell Colony for providing the magical gifts of space, time, and quiet, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund for its support.

  The research for this novel was undertaken primarily at the Doheny Memorial Library at U.S.C., the U.C.L.A. College Library, the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley, the McHenry Library at U.C. Santa Cruz, and the New-York Historical Society.

  I have tried to respect history and geography wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully or with regret, ignored them.

  I have relied on the prior labor of many writers here, but above all on that of the collective authors of the 1939 W.P.A. New York City Guide (John Cheever and Richard Wright among them), and on the work of E. J. Kahn, Jr., Brendan Gill, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, St. Clair McKelway, and all the other great urban portraitists, many of them anonymous, who never failed me when I went searching for their lost city in dusty old bound back issues of The New Yorker. Other helpful or indispensable books were: Letters from Prague: 1939–1941, compiled by Raya Czerner Schapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg, The Nightmare of Reason, by Ernst Pawel, and Elder of the Jews, by Ruth Bondy; The World Almanac and Book of Facts for 1941, edited by E. Eastman Irvine, No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester, The Lost World of the Fair, by David Gelernter, and Delivered from Evil, by Robert Leckie; The Secrets of Houdini, by J. C. Cannell, Blackstone’s Modern Card Tricks, by Harry Blackstone, Professional Magic Made Easy, by Bruce Elliott, Houdini on Magic, by Harry Houdini, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, by William Lindsay Gresham, and Houdini!!!, by Kenneth Silverman; Little America and Discovery, both by Richard E. Byrd, A History of Antarctic Science, by G. E. Fogg, The White Continent, by Thomas R. Henry, Quest for a Continent, by Walter Sullivan, and Antarctic Night, by Jack Bursey; New York Panorama, by the Federal Writers’ Project of the W.P.A., The Empire State Building, by John Tauranac, The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996, by Charles Kaiser, and The Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson; The Great Comic Book Heroes, by Jules Feiffer, All in Color for a Dime, by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson, The Great Comic Book Artists and Great History of Comic Books, both by Ron Goulart, Superhero Comics of the Golden Age: The Illustrated History, by Mike Benton, The Art of the Comic Book, by Robert C. Harvey, and The Comic Book Makers, by Joe Simon with Jim Simon; On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, by Gershom Scholem, and Gates to the Old City, by Raphael Patai; The Big Broadcast, by Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, Don’t Touch That Dial, by J. Fred MacDonald, and The Book of Practical Radio, by John Scott-Taggart; as well as the following sites on the World Wide Web: Michael Norwitz’s Lev Gleason’s Comic House (http://www.angelfire.com/mn/blaklion/index.html), Bob King’s Houdini Tribute (http://www.houdinitribute.com), and Peter Bacon Hales’s Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb (http://www.uic.edu/∼pbhales/Levittown/index.html).

  I have sought to meet the high standards of the amazing Mary Evans for nearly fifteen years, and only to the extent that it meets them can I be satisfied with this work. Kate Medina blessed this voyage when I had no more than a fictitious map to steer by, and lashed me to the wheel when the seas turned rough. I’m indebted to David Colden, for scaring the pants off of Sheldon Anapol. I am grateful to Scott Rudin, for his patience and faith, to Tanya McKinnon, Benjamin Dreyer, E. Beth Thomas, Meaghan Rady, Frankie Jones, Alexa Cassanos, and Paula Shuster. And, everlastingly, to Ayelet Waldman, for inspiring, nurturing, and ensuring, in a thousand ways, every single word of this novel, down to the very last period.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge the deep debt I owe in this and everything else I’ve ever written to the work of the late Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.

  ODDS & ENDS

  WHY ARE YOU STILL READING? THE BOOK’S OVER. GO PLAY OUTSIDE.

  OF ALL THE TRICKS PLAYED by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedient disguised as an aesthetic choice or, worse, a moral commentary on the finitude of life. Endings are as imaginary as the equator or the poles. They draw a line, mark a point, that is present nowhere in the creation they purport to reflect and explain. Sure, death ties off our little subplot more or less neatly, but it is in no sense the end of the greater tale. Beginnings can feel arbitrary, too (Sir Kay and the pulling of sword from anvil and stone? the portentous birth of Arthur? Uther’s seduction of Igraine?), but in fact they are as requisite as the first pitch of a baseball game, an absolute requirement, which can lead to the mild panic reflected in the first sentence of Howards End: One has to begin somewhere. Like a baseball game, in theory, a novel could go on forever, as long as readerly patience and writerly fortitude—home team and visitors—endure. In this respect, perhaps The Thousand Nights and a Night, in its Möbius monstrousness, is the only true story ever told. The fundamental purpose of storytelling is to pass the time, which is infinite, slow, and weighs heavy on our hands. When the first storyteller, having told the first story, fell silent, somebody sitting there by the fire said, “Then what happened?” and the Age of Sequels began.

  Every so often—not often enough to nudge me into trying it—somebody asks if I ever plan to write a sequel to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I do intend to do so—maybe. Someday. After all the other books have been written, or shortly before that terminal point, or, who knows, maybe next year, I would like to turn my attention to the wild and wide-open era of comics into which I was born, to the people who created them, and to the New York City of the 1970s that dreamed up those comics and those women and men. The war, the world, and America were all very different in the 1970s than they had been during the so-called Golden Age, but the forces of liberation were still very much at war with the minions of the Iron Chain, and I’d like to know what the Escapist got up to during the so-called Bronze Age of Comics, in those days when Pynchonian entropy and the width of blazer lapels veered giddily toward the maximum. If I’m up to the job and I feel I can inhabit, understand, and adequately portray the city that produced the New York Dolls, David Berkowitz, and Howard the Duck, I might just give it a try. Someday. Maybe.

  In the meantime, I suppose the pieces that follow will have to do. Two of them, “Breakfast in the Wreck” and “The Return of the Amazing Cavalieri,” are properly neither sequels nor prequels (a word born, with the second Godfather film, during that Age of Bronze), in that they neither follow nor precede the main action of the novel but rather dwell, ghostly, in the midst of it. They were the last two chapters I cut from the novel before publication, in a humanitarian effort to reduce the time it would take the heroic reader to reach my arbitrarily marked pole. They are sequels by virtue of the fact that the reader is likely to read them only after finishing the novel proper—if he or she reads them at all. “Outtakes” might be a better term. The account of elementary-school escape artistry in “Cavalieri” echoes and comments on Joe and Thomas’s efforts long ago on the banks of the Vltava, and “Breakfast in the Wreck” gives the curious reader an apocryphal picture of Sammy’s life during the longest dark he is ever likely to inhabit, there in the deepest corner of the Closet. Like the halves of a medallion split between separated twins in a cheap melodrama, they form, when united, a narrative whole. One of them, it strikes me now, left the novel stronger for its ejection; the other I regret having pitched over the side of my boat into the deep. I will leave it to you to decide which chapter is which.

  “Fifty Dollars Takes It Home,” considered and rejected as a possible conclusion for the original novel and later published in the catalog of a traveling museum exhibition on Jews and the Comic Book, is less a sequel than an epilogue, rapidly filling the reader in on the subsequent fates, post-“ending,” of the novel’s main characters, which the novel itself says little about. This is the American Graffiti move—the silent, somber litany of deaths and marriages, some su
rprising, that we will never get to see or experience through the point of view of the characters they befall. A few details can be gleaned: of Rosa’s subsequent marriage, of Sam’s post-Kefauver existence, of the general air of ruefulness that hangs over the exhibit table manned by the survivors of Kavalier & Clay. The usual air of restraint present in epilogue sequences of this kind, presenting loss, failure, and triumph with an evenhanded dispassion, is matched by the chosen storytelling strategy, which was to abandon exuberant and encyclopedic omniscience in favor of a lean first-person pastiche of The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.”

  “The Crossover,” therefore, is the only real contender in the bunch, written well after the novel was published and featuring what appears to be a canonical Sam Clay in a brief tale told by the narrator we remember from the novel. It was written to introduce The Escapists, published by Dark Horse Comics, which collected the six issues of the eponymous comic book series. The Escapists was not a sequel but a spin-off, one that postulated a world in which the character of the Escapist and his creators, Kavalier & Clay, have been largely forgotten, and in which three young people from Cleveland, Ohio, revive the Master of Elusion and feature him, while falling in and out of love and danger, in their own independently produced comic books. The Escapists was illustrated by Jason Shawn Alexander, Steve Rolston, Philip Bond, and Eduardo Barreto, and written by a young genius named Brian K. Vaughan, who received the bizarre compliment of finding himself, or a juvenile version of himself, starring, without Mr. Vaughan’s consent or foreknowledge, in one last sad, not particularly amazing little adventure of escape.

  These pieces, along with the elaborate metafictional gag of a comic book series, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, also published by Dark Horse, represent the tangible afterlife, to date, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. But they fail to constitute a true sequel to that novel, as will Son of Kavalier & Clay, should I ever-someday, maybe—get around to writing it. For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.

  Michael Chabon, 2011

  BREAKFAST IN THE WRECK

  THE CULLODEN DINER, IN PEQUOT, New York, two stops beyond Bloomtown on the LIRR, had been formed by the forcible coupling of an abandoned house, its siding and boarded-up windows painted a pale shade of pancake batter, to the shell of decommissioned New York City trolley car. Because, due to some miscalculation or subsidence of the foundation slab, the trolley car sat at a lurching angle to the little old house, with its blank surprised mien and air of buckling studs and sagging rafters, the diner was known among its devotees as the Collision or, paraphrastically, the Wreck. Its Greek owner or his daughter would unlock the door of the lobby—a glassed-in square of ash-gray linoleum with just enough room for a woolly rubber mat, an umbrella stand, and a Kiwanis gum-ball dispenser—every weekday morning at six o’clock. Within five minutes, the dozen booths, low-backed, padded in translucent syrup-brown Naugahyde, and the flecked laminate counter, worn down in patches to the wooden underply by the transit of plates and running the length of the streetcar, would be crowded with the Wreck’s steady clientele of men who could not afford the time or bear the torment it would cost them to eat their breakfasts at home.

  On a chilly April morning in 1954, the Wreck’s patrons would perhaps, to the eyes of a later generation, have seemed most remarkable for the nonchalant fury with which they coughed their way through the day’s first half-dozen cigarettes, and for the profusion—in retrospect, it seems a kind of routine opulence—of their hats. There were men wearing astrakhans and homburgs, tweed caps, Tyrolean hats with feathers, and, above all, dented felt snap-brims, in all the soft browns and grays of an overcast Long Island Friday. These men carried topcoats and attaché cases and wore bloody rosettes of tissue on their cheeks. There were men in hunting caps, watch caps, canvas shakos, and peaked baseball caps, wearing pea coats, oilskin coats, and bomber jackets emblazoned with the names of hauling concerns and utility companies, carrying big military-green metal thermos bottles that the Greek’s daughter filled up for a nickel. And there was a small, shifting population of local failures, layabouts, and drunks, hatless, many of them, others sporting something unlikely, a beret, a pom-pommed Santa’s-elf stocking cap, a battered old derby of the sort worn in the comics by street urchins and Brooklyn boys. Among this latter group were many who had not yet turned in for the night and others who were merely killing time until ten, when the Earshot opened, and they would head across Gay Street to drink their morning meal.

  All these men lived in and around Pequot and were familiar, at least, with one another’s faces, if not with their entire biographies, work histories, police records, tastes in music and baseball teams, favorite prizefighters, wives and daughters and sons; but there was, after all, the train station three doors down Gay Street, and the appearance of strangers at any time of the day was not unusual. It was little remarked when a pair of unfamiliar men had shown up, one frigid morning several months before, to assume a pair of quiet stools at the counter, and it would have been difficult if not impossible for any of the local men to pinpoint the moment when he realized that the two had become regulars.

  They arrived every Friday just a few minutes after the Greek switched on the neon sign in the window. They were small men, the younger one—he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five—dapper and well groomed, with an elegant, painful slenderness that showed in the knobs of his wrists and in the big ridged knuckle of his larynx. He wore his hair cropped so short that he did not need to use pomade, and he always—on Fridays, at least—wore a red bow tie. The other fellow was more of a fireplug, broad in the chest and shoulders, with a wide pugnacious face and the hint of a shadow even on his freshly shaved jaw. He always looked as if he had not dressed for work that morning so much as gotten into some kind of altercation with his suit, shirt, and tie. Though he could not have been more than ten years older than the other man, there were striations of gray in the dark shining gloss of his temples, and his forehead, even in repose, was arched with wrinkles, lending him a permanent expression of skepticism or mild surprise.

  The two companions always took the booth in the farthest corner of what once was the yellow house’s living room—long since buried under a layer of sparkle laminate and rippling chrome—or, if that chanced to be taken, the one across from it, by the door to the toilets. They greeted the proprietor, and smiled at his daughter, and would always return a nod from another customer, but they rarely offered or accepted offers to engage in small talk, so that such offers ceased in due course to be tendered. They just came in, sat down, ate their breakfasts, paid their tab, and left. If it was raining or snowing, they would shake hands in the lobby; if not, they said their standard curt goodbye out in the parking lot: a single downward shake with something decisive in it, as if each time they had just settled something between them, and from now on they would be partners in some modest but rewarding business venture or else need never see each other again. Then the dapper one, who barely an hour before had stepped off the eastbound train from Jamaica, would rush back toward the station with all the other westbound men hurrying to make the 7:14, while the stockier man got into his car and drove away.

  This morning they had the booth at the back, number 11. The skinny fellow, something of a trencherman, was working his way through his usual breakfast of three eggs over easy, a hamburg steak, fried potatoes, and four slices of rye toast. His companion, who never from the time he ducked into the diner until he went outside again lost the look of morning queasiness common to heavy smokers, limited himself, as usual, to a pair of buttered sweet rolls. There was a certain suggestion of unaccustomed agitation, or of expectancy, in the way he checked his watch, signaled to the waitress with a wiggling finger, shifted and squirmed and rocked back and forth in his booth. But then he was always, the fireplug, something of a fidget.

  He and his friend
spoke steadily throughout their meal, as always, in soft but not conspiratorial tones free of any hint that felt either constrained or hurried or impelled to condense into this allotted weekly hour together the rich, slow, miscellaneous narrative of something real. Their eyes met, held, then sought their plates or coffee or the cigarette balanced on the ashtray’s lip. They seemed more than willing, even eager, to share in the general effort among the men of the Culloden to banish beasts and darkness with a steady blaze of wisecracks and sententious declarations. Anyone passing their table might have picked up bits of conversation that differed not at all from those taking place throughout the Wreck.

  “It was a mistake to let Dressen go,” said the man in the red bow tie.

  “The guy was only looking for a little job security,” the older man agreed. “Which he earned, in my opinion. Two pennants and a tie in three seasons.”

  “What’s with the davening?” the other said.

  “Sorry.” The older man made a show of stopping his steady, slight rocking, gripping the chrome-trimmed edge of the table with both hands.

  “You need to use the bathroom?”

  “I’ll stop. How’s your mother?”

  “Better. Sleeping again.”

  “Thank goodness for that.”

  “I got a night’s sleep last night. Five hours. First time in a month or more.”

  “You look much better.” The older man picked up his cigarette, set it down, picked it up again. A lump of burning ash fell from the end onto his paper napkin. He smashed it with a palm. The water glasses rang and the coffee cups jumped. “Jeez,” he said.

  “Take it easy.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little jumpy today, I don’t know why.”

  “Can’t imagine.” There was a note of asperity in the younger man’s voice. He concealed it behind his coffee cup, taking a long sip. “Jump away.”