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Excerpt
Part
One--The Escape Artist
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience
of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare,
apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when
he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known
as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing
crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly
expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of Comics Journal
"You weren't the same person when you came out as when you
went in.
Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting
started. It was called 'Metamorphosis: It was never just a question
of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth
was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in
Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola
Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role-of
the role of his own imagination-in the Escapist's birth, like all
of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque:
they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad
for a taste of light and air. Houdini was a hero to little men,
city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was
seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite
as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be,
like many optimists, a little excitable. he was not, in any conventional
way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin
pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched,
and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been
jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the
hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was
no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient
to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this
was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered
the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells,
which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until
his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left
him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five
feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it
a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an
incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television,
atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition-one of a
thousand-of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great
Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving
streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe,
Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement
regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert
passion-one of them, at any rate-was for those two-bit argosies
of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every
biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well
on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay-and the true history of the
Escapists birth-began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the
night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring
and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and
told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from
Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In
the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he
made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like
a question mark against the doorframe, a disheveled pile of newspapers
pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his
face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward
the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived
in Brooklyn tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over
until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take
both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"
"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at
the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending
particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had
just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation
at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale
breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform
gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed
her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry
smell like fresh pencil shavings. "He can barely stand on his
own two feet"
Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor
Josef Kavalier in his baggy wool suit. He had known, dimly, that
he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any
of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy's bed. He wasn't
sure just how San Francisco fitted in to the story.
"There you are," his mother said, standing up straight
again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost
rive inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. "Come
here. I want to tell you something:' She grabbed hold of his ears
as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his cheeks
in turn with her lips. "You made it. All right? You're here:'
"All right," said her nephew. He did not sound unconvinced.
She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy
reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood
there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman
switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness.
Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out
The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy
thud of defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a
chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall
one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water
glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in
under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit,
damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy
presently identified as the smell, on his cousin's breath, of prunes
from the leftover ingot of his mother's "special" meatloaf-prunes
were only a small part of what made it so very special-which he
had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set
on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would
be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and
had said nothing about it to Sammy.
Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat
once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been
unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even
so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly.
Josef's breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering
if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his
cousin spoke.
"As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging,
and leave the bed," he said. His accent was vaguely German,
furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.
"That would be nice," Sammy said. "You speak good
English:'
"Thank you"
"Where'd you learn it?"
"I prefer not to say."
"It's a secret?"
"It is a personal matter."
"Can you tell me what you were doing in California?" said
Sammy. "Or is that confidential information too?"
"I was crossing over from Japan!'
"Japan!" Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther
on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing
more treacherous than the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated
Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom
hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in
a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his
grandmother's snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley,
Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation
and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself
into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton
Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through
practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give
him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In
his desk drawer lay-and had lain for some time-the first eleven
pages of a massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either
(in the Perelmanian mode)Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian)
American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and
large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours
of mute concentration-brow furrowed, breath held-to the development
of his brain's latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And
he had thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters,
ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered
himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around
the attainment of fabulous sums of money.
From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants,
cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable
combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on
the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers,
tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent
years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field
of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators
and cartoonists Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff-were at their
zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing
board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very
texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy's closet were stacked
dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians,
football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos,
Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women's
clothing, the dents in men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds
in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge
of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy-but he was an enterprising
thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and
comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different
exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible
of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip
called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great
Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel
of the Planets, and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called
Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee
Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept
his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting
for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience
of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare,
apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's greatest creation, that back when
he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known
as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.
"To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing
crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly
expound at WonderCon or Angouleme or to the editor of Comics Journal
"You weren't the same person when you came out as when you
went in.
Houdini's first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting
started. It was called 'Metamorphosis: It was never just a question
of escape. It was also a question of transformation." The truth
was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in
Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola
Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role-of
the role of his own imagination-in the Escapist's birth, like all
of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque:
they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad
for a taste of light and air. Houdini was a hero to little men,
city boys, and Jews; Samuel Louis Klayman was all three. He was
seventeen when the adventures began: bigmouthed, perhaps not quite
as quick on his feet as he liked to imagine, and tending to be,
like many optimists, a little excitable. he was not, in any conventional
way, handsome. His face was an inverted triangle, brow large, chin
pointed, with pouting lips and a blunt, quarrelsome nose. He slouched,
and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had just been
jumped for his lunch money. He went forward each morning with the
hairless cheek of innocence itself, but by noon a clean shave was
no more than a memory, a hoboish penumbra on the jaw not quite sufficient
to make him look tough. He thought of himself as ugly, but this
was because he had never seen his face in repose. He had delivered
the Eagle for most of 1931 in order to afford a set of dumbbells,
which he had hefted every morning for the next eight years until
his arms, chest, and shoulders were ropy and strong; polio had left
him with the legs of a delicate boy. He stood, in his socks, five
feet five inches tall. Like all of his friends, he considered it
a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass. He possessed an
incorrect but fervent understanding of the workings of television,
atom power, and antigravity, and harbored the ambition-one of a
thousand-of ending his days on the warm sunny beaches of the Great
Polar Ocean of Venus. An omnivorous reader with a self-improving
streak, cozy with Stevenson, London, and Wells, dutiful about Wolfe,
Dreiser, and Dos Passos, idolatrous of S. J. Perelman, his self-improvement
regime masked the usual guilty appetite. In his case the covert
passion-one of them, at any rate-was for those two-bit argosies
of blood and wonder, the pulps. He had tracked down and read every
biweekly issue of The Shadow going back to 1933, and he was well
on his way to amassing complete runs of The Avenger and Doc Savage.
The long run of Kavalier & Clay-and the true history of the
Escapists birth-began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the
night that Sammy's mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring
and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and
told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from
Prague. Sammy sat up, heart pounding in the hinges of his jaw. In
the livid light of the fluorescent tube over the kitchen sink, he
made out a slender young man of about his own age, slumped like
a question mark against the doorframe, a disheveled pile of newspapers
pinned under one arm, the other thrown as if in shame across his
face. This, Mrs. Klayman said, giving Sammy a helpful shove toward
the wall, was Josef Kavalier, her brother Emil's son, who had arrived
in Brooklyn tonight on a Greyhound bus, all the way from San Francisco.
"What's the matter with him?" Sammy said. He slid over
until his shoulders touched cold plaster. He was careful to take
both of the pillows with him. "Is he sick?"
"What do you think?" said his mother, slapping now at
the vacated expanse of bedsheet, as if to scatter any offending
particles of himself that Sammy might have left behind. She had
just come home from her last night on a two-week graveyard rotation
at Bellevue, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse. The stale
breath of the hospital was on her, but the open throat of her uniform
gave off a faint whiff of the lavender water in which she bathed
her tiny frame. The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry
smell like fresh pencil shavings. "He can barely stand on his
own two feet"
Sammy peered over his mother, trying to get a better look at poor
Josef Kavalier in his baggy wool suit. He had known, dimly, that
he had Czech cousins. But his mother had not said a word about any
of them coming to visit, let alone to share Sammy's bed. He wasn't
sure just how San Francisco fitted in to the story.
"There you are," his mother said, standing up straight
again, apparently satisfied at having driven Sammy onto the easternmost
rive inches of the mattress. She turned to Josef Kavalier. "Come
here. I want to tell you something:' She grabbed hold of his ears
as if taking a jug by the handles, and crushed each of his cheeks
in turn with her lips. "You made it. All right? You're here:'
"All right," said her nephew. He did not sound unconvinced.
She handed him a washcloth and went out. As soon as she left, Sammy
reclaimed a few precious inches of mattress while his cousin stood
there, rubbing at his mauled cheeks. After a moment, Mrs. Klayman
switched off the light in the kitchen, and they were left in darkness.
Sammy heard his cousin take a deep breath and slowly let it out
The stack of newsprint rattled and then hit the floor with a heavy
thud of defeat. His jacket buttons clicked against the back of a
chair; his trousers rustled as he stepped out of them; he let fall
one shoe, then the other. His wristwatch chimed against the water
glass on the nightstand. Then he and a gust of chilly air got in
under the covers, bearing with them an odor of cigarette, armpit,
damp wool, and something sweet and somehow nostalgic that Sammy
presently identified as the smell, on his cousin's breath, of prunes
from the leftover ingot of his mother's "special" meatloaf-prunes
were only a small part of what made it so very special-which he
had seen her wrap like a parcel in a sheet of wax paper and set
on a plate in the Frigidaire. So she had known that her nephew would
be arriving tonight, had even been expecting him for supper, and
had said nothing about it to Sammy.
Josef Kavalier settled back against the mattress, cleared his throat
once, tucked his arms under his head, and then, as if he had been
unplugged, stopped moving. He neither tossed nor fidgeted nor even
so much as flexed a toe. The Big Ben on the nightstand ticked loudly.
Josef's breathing thickened and slowed. Sammy was just wondering
if anyone could possibly fall asleep with such abandon when his
cousin spoke.
"As soon as I can fetch some money, I will find a lodging,
and leave the bed," he said. His accent was vaguely German,
furrowed with an odd Scots pleat.
"That would be nice," Sammy said. "You speak good
English:'
"Thank you"
"Where'd you learn it?"
"I prefer not to say."
"It's a secret?"
"It is a personal matter."
"Can you tell me what you were doing in California?" said
Sammy. "Or is that confidential information too?"
"I was crossing over from Japan!'
"Japan!" Sammy was sick with envy. He had never gone farther
on his soda-straw legs than Buffalo, never undertaken any crossing
more treacherous than the flatulent poison-green ribbon that separated
Brooklyn from Manhattan Island. In that narrow bed, in that bedroom
hardly wider than the bed itself, at the back of an apartment in
a solidly lower-middle-class building on Ocean Avenue, with his
grandmother's snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley,
Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation
and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself
into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton
Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through
practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give
him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. In
his desk drawer lay-and had lain for some time-the first eleven
pages of a massive autobiographical novel to be entitled either
(in the Perelmanian mode)Through Abe Glass, Darkly or (in the Dreiserian)
American Disillusionment (a subject of which he was still by and
large ignorant). He had devoted an embarrassing number of hours
of mute concentration-brow furrowed, breath held-to the development
of his brain's latent powers of telepathy and mind control. And
he had thrilled to that Iliad of medical heroics, The Microbe Hunters,
ten times at least. But like most natives of Brooklyn, Sammy considered
himself a realist, and in general his escape plans centered around
the attainment of fabulous sums of money.
From the age of six, he had sold seeds, candy bars, houseplants,
cleaning fluids, metal polish, magazine subscriptions, unbreakable
combs, and shoelaces door-to-door. In a Zharkov's laboratory on
the kitchen table, he had invented almost functional button-reattachers,
tandem bottle openers, and heatless clothes irons. In more recent
years, Sammy's commercial attention had been arrested by the field
of professional illustration. The great commercial illustrators
and cartoonists Rockwell, Leyendecker, Raymond, Caniff-were at their
zenith, and there was a general impression abroad that, at the drawing
board, a man could not only make a good living but alter the very
texture and tone of the national mood. In Sammy's closet were stacked
dozens of pads of coarse newsprint, filled with horses, Indians,
football heroes, sentient apes, Fokkers, nymphs, moon rockets, buckaroos,
Saracens, tropic jungles, grizzlies, studies of the folds in women's
clothing, the dents in men's hats, the lights in human irises, clouds
in the western sky. His grasp of perspective was tenuous, his knowledge
of human anatomy dubious, his line often sketchy-but he was an enterprising
thief. He clipped favorite pages and panels out of newspapers and
comic books and pasted them into a fat notebook: a thousand different
exemplary poses and styles. He had made extensive use of his bible
of clippings in concocting a counterfeit Terry and the Pirates strip
called South China Sea, drawn in faithful imitation of the great
Caniff. He had knocked off Raymond in something he called Pimpernel
of the Planets, and Chester Gould in a lockjawed G-man strip called
Knuckle Duster Doyle. He had tried swiping from Hogarth and Lee
Falk, from George Herriman, Harold Gray, and Elzie Segar. He kept
his sample strips in a fat cardboard portfolio under his bed, waiting
for an opportunity, for his main chance, to present itself.
"Ask me what?"
"What was with all the newspapers?"
"They are your New York newspapers. I bought them at the Grand
Central Station:'
"How many?"
For the first time, he noticed, Josef Kavalier twitched. "Eleven:'
Sammy quickly calculated on his ringers: there were eight metropolitan
dailies. Ten if you counted the Eagle and the Home News. "I'm
missing one:'
"Missing-?"
" Times, Herald Tribune," he touched two fingertips, "
World-Telegram, Journal-American, Sun." He switched hands.
"News, Post. Uh, Wall Street Journal. And the Brooklyn Eagle.
And the Home News in the Bronx:' He dropped his hands to the mattress.
"What's eleven?"
"The Woman's Daily Wearing."
"Women's Wear Daily?"
"I didn't know it was like that. For the garments." He
laughed at himself, a series of brief, throat-clearing rasps. "I
was looking for something about Prague:'
"Did you find anything? They must have had something in the
Times."
"Something. A little. Nothing about the Jews."
"The Jews," said Sammy, beginning to understand. It wasn't
the latest diplomatic maneuverings in London and Berlin, or the
most recent bit of brutal posturing by Adolf Hitler, that Josef
was hoping to get news of. He was looking for an item detailing
the condition of the Kavalier family. "You know Jewish? Yiddish.
You know it?"
"No:'
"That's too bad. We got four Jewish newspapers in New York.
They'd probably have something:'
"What about German newspapers?"
"I don't know, but I'd imagine so. We certainly have a lot
of Germans. They've been marching and having rallies all over town."
"I see."
"You're worried about your family?"
There was no reply.
"They couldn't get out?"
"No. Not yet" Sammy felt Josef give his head a sharp shake,
as if to end the discussion. "I find I have smoked all my cigarettes,"
he went on, in a neutral, phrase-book tone. "Perhaps you could-"
"You know, I smoked my last one before bed," said Sammy.
"Hey, how'd you know I smoke? Do I smell?"
"Sammy," his mother called, "sleep:'
Sammy sniffed himself. "Huh. I wonder if Ethel can smell it.
She doesn't like it. I want to smoke, I've got to go out the window,
there, onto the fire escape:'
"No smoking in bed," Josef said. "The more reason
then for me to leave it:'
"You don't have to tell me," Sammy said. "I'm dying
to have a place of my own:'
They lay there for a few minutes, longing for cigarettes and for
all the things that this longing, in its perfect frustration, seemed
to condense and embody.
"Your ash holder," Josef said finally. "Ashtray!'
"On the fire escape. It's a plant!'
"It might be filled with the ... spacek? ... kippe? ... the
stubbles?"
"The butts, you mean?"
"The butts:'
"Yeah, I guess. Don't tell me you'd smoke-"
Without warning, in a kind of kinetic discharge of activity that
seemed to be both the counterpart and the product of the state of
perfect indolence that had immediately preceded it, Josef rolled
over and out of the bed. Sammy's eyes had by now adjusted to the
darkness of his room, which was always, at any rate, incomplete.
A selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the
bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn,
a compound derived from the haloes of streetlights, the headlamps
of trolleys and cars, the fires of the borough's three active steel
mills, and the shed luster of the island kingdom to the west, that
came slanting in through a parting in the curtains. In this faint
glow that was, to Sammy, the sickly steady light of insomnia itself,
he could see his cousin going methodically through the pockets of
the clothes he had earlier hung so carefully from the back of the
chair.
"The lamp?" Josef whispered.
Sammy shook his head. "The mother," he said.
Josef came back to the bed and sat down. "Then we must to work
in the darkness:'
He held between the first fingers of his left hand a pleated leaf
of cigarette paper. Sammy understood. He sat up on one arm, and
with the other tugged the curtains apart, slowly so as not to produce
the telltale creak. Then, gritting his teeth, he raised the sash
of the window beside his bed, letting in a chilly hum of traffic
and a murmuring blast of cold March midnight. Sammy's "ashtray"
was an oblong terra-cotta pot, vaguely Mexican, filled with a sterile
compound of potting soil and soot and the semipetrified skeleton,
appropriately enough, of a cineraria that had gone unsold during
Sammy's houseplant days and thus predated his smoking habit, still
a fairly recent acquisition, by about three years. A dozen stubbed-out
ends of Old Golds squirmed around the base of the withered plant,
and Sammy distastefully plucked a handful of them-they were slightly
damp-as if gathering night crawlers, then handed them in to his
cousin, who traded him for a box of matches that evocatively encouraged
him to EAT AT JOE'S CRAB ON FISHERMAN'S WHARF, in which only one
match remained.
Quickly, but not without a certain showiness, Josef split open seven
butts, one-handed, and tipped the resultant mass of pulpy threads
into the wrinkled scrap of Zig Zag. After half a minute's work,
he had manufactured them a smoke.
"Come," he said. He walked on his knees across the bed
to the window, where Sammy joined him, and they wriggled through
the sash and thrust their heads and upper bodies out of the building.
He handed the cigarette to Sammy and, in the precious flare of the
match, as Sammy nervously sheltered it from the wind, he saw that
Josef had prestidigitated a perfect cylinder, as thick and straight
and nearly as smooth as if rolled by machine. Sammy took a long
drag of True Virginia Flavor and then passed the magic cigarette
back to its crafter, and they smoked it in silence, until only a
hot quarter inch remained. Then they climbed back inside, lowered
the sash and the blinds, and lay back, bedmates, reeking of smoke.
"You know," Sammy said, "we're, uh, we've all been
really worried ... about Hitler... and the way he's treating the
Jews and ... and all that. When they, when you were ... invaded....
My mom was ... we all... 7 He shook his own head, not sure what
he was trying to say. "Here:' He sat up a little, and tugged
one of the pillows out from under the back of his head.
Josef Kavalier lifted his own head from the mattress and stuffed
the pillow beneath it. "Thank you," he said, then lay
still once more.
Presently, his breathing grew steady and slowed to a congested rattle,
leaving Sammy to ponder alone, as he did every night, the usual
caterpillar schemes. But in his imaginings, Sammy found that, for
the first time in years, he was able to avail himself of the help
of a confederate.
Excerpted from THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY (c) Copyright
2000 by Michael Chabon. Reprinted with permission from the publisher,
Random House. All rights reserved.
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