The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
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Fairies of Democracy come to award him the presidency of General Motors, a contract with Warner Bros., and a penthouse on Fifth Avenue with a swimming pool in the living room, he would have greeted this, too, with the same dreamlike unsurprise. It had not occurred to him until now to consider that his cousin’s display of bold entrepreneurial confidence might have been entirely bluff, that it was 8°C and he had neither hat nor gloves, that his stomach was as empty as his billfold, and that he and Sammy were nothing more than a couple of callow young men in thrall to a rash and dubious promise.
“But I have belief in you,” Joe said. “I trust you.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“I mean it.”
“I wish I knew why.”
“Because,” said Joe. “I don’t have any choice.”
“Oh ho.”
“I need money,” Joe said, and then tried adding, “god damn it.”
“Money.” The word seemed to have a restorative effect on Sammy, snapping him out of his daze. “Right. Okay. First of all, we need horses.”
“Horses?”
“Arms. Guys.”
“Artists.”
“How about we just call them ‘guys’ for right now?”
“Do you know where we can find some?”
Sammy thought for a moment. “I believe I do,” he said. “Come on.”
They set off in a direction that Joe decided was probably west. As they walked Sammy seemed to get lost quickly in his own reflections. Joe tried to imagine the train of his cousin’s thoughts, but the particulars of the task at hand were not clear to him, and after a while he gave up and just kept pace. Sammy’s gait was deliberate and crooked, and Joe found it a challenge to keep from getting ahead. There was a humming sound everywhere that he attributed first to the circulation of his own blood in his ears before he realized that it was the sound produced by Twenty-fifth Street itself, by a hundred sewing machines in a sweatshop overhead, exhaust grilles at the back of a warehouse, the trains rolling deep beneath the black surface of the street. Joe gave up trying to think like, trust, or believe in his cousin and just walked, head abuzz, toward the Hudson River, stunned by the novelty of exile.
“Who is he?” Sammy said at last, as they were crossing a broad street which a sign identified, improbably somehow, as Sixth Avenue. Sixth Avenue! The Hudson River!
“Who is he,” Joe said.
“Who is he, and what does he do?”
“He flies.”
Sammy shook his head. “Superman flies.”
“So ours does not?”
“I just think I’d …”
“To be original.”
“If we can. Try to do it without flying, at least. No flying, no strength of a hundred men, no bulletproof skin.”
“Okay,” Joe said. The humming seemed to recede a little. “And some others, they do what?”
“Well, Batman—”
“He flies, like a bat.”
“No, he doesn’t fly.”
“But he is blind.”
“No, he only dresses like a bat. He has no batlike qualities at all. He uses his fists.”
“That sounds dull.”
“Actually, it’s spooky. You’d like it.”
“Maybe another animal.”
“Uh, well, yeah. Okay. A hawk. Hawkman.”
“Hawk, yes, okay. But that one must fly.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Scratch the bird family. The, uh, the Fox. The Shark.”
“A swimming one.”
“Maybe a swimming one. Actually, no, I know a guy works in the Chesler shop, he said they’re already doing a guy who swims. For Timely.”
“A lion?”
“Lion. The Lion. Lionman.”
“He could be strong. He roars very loud.”
“He has a super roar.”
“It strikes fear.”
“It breaks dishes.”
“The bad guys go deaf.”
They laughed. Joe stopped laughing.
“I think we have to be serious,” he said.
“You’re right,” said Sammy. “The Lion, I don’t know. Lions are lazy. How about the Tiger. Tigerman. No, no. Tigers are killers. Shit. Let’s see.”
They began to go through the rolls of the animal kingdom, concentrating naturally on the predators: Catman, Wolfman, the Owl, the Panther, the Black Bear. They considered the primates: the Monkey, Gorillaman, the Gibbon, the Ape, the Mandrill with his multicolored wonder ass that he used to bedazzle opponents.
“Be serious,” Joe chided again.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Look, forget animals. Everybody’s going to be thinking of animals. In two months, I’m telling you, by the time our guy hits the stands, there’s going to be guys running around dressed like every damn animal in the zoo. Birds. Bugs. Underwater guys. And I’ll bet you anything there’s going to be five guys who are really strong, and invulnerable, and can fly.”
“If he goes as fast as the light,” Joe suggested.
“Yeah, I guess it’s good to be fast.”
“Or if he can make a thing burn up. If he can—listen! If he can, you know. Shoot the fire, with his eyes!”
“His eyeballs would melt.”
“Then with his hands. Or, yes, he turns into a fire!”
“Timely’s doing that already, too. They got the fire guy and the water guy.”
“He turns into ice. He makes the ice everywhere.”
“Crushed or cubes?”
“Not good?”
Sammy shook his head. “Ice,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of stories in ice.”
“He turns into electricity?” Joe tried. “He turns into acid?”
“He turns into gravy. He turns into an enormous hat. Look, stop. Stop. Just stop.”
They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
“This is not the question,” he said. “If he’s like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he’s huge, if he’s tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays or Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India rubber. He could be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or monster. Okay? It doesn’t matter, because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling, I’m telling you. Every little skinny guy like me in New York who believes there’s life on Alpha Centauri and got the shit kicked out of him in school and can smell a dollar is out there right this minute trying to jump onto it, walking around with a pencil in his shirt pocket, saying, ‘He’s like a falcon, no, he’s like a tornado, no, he’s like a goddamned wiener dog.’ Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And no