The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Michael Chabon
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true that Houdini could dislocate his shoulders at will? According to Kornblum, no. Was it more important in the trade to be strong or dexterous? It required more finesse than dexterity, more endurance than strength. Did you generally cut, pick, or rig a way out? All three and more—you pried, you wriggled, you hacked, you kicked. Joe remembered some of the things Kornblum had told him of his career in show business, the hard conditions, the endless travel, the camaraderie of performers, the painstaking and ongoing transmission among magicians and illusionists of accumulated lore.
“My father was in vaudeville,” Sammy said. “Show business.”
“I know. I have heard from my father one time. He was a strong man, yes? He was very strong.”
“He was the World’s Strongest Jew,” Sammy said.
“He is now …”
“He is now dead.”
“I am sorry.”
“He was a bastard,” Sammy said.
“Oh.”
“Not literally. That’s just an expression. He was a schmuck. He left when I was a little kid and never came back.”
“Ah.”
“He was all muscle. No heart. He was like Superman without the Clark Kent.”
“Is that why you don’t want our guy”—he had adopted Sammy’s term—“to be strong?”
“No! I just don’t want our guy to be the same as everybody else’s, you know?”
“My mistake,” said Joe. He sensed, however, that he was right. He could hear the admiration in Sammy’s voice even as he pronounced the late Mr. Klayman a bastard.
“What’s your father like?” Sammy said.
“He is a good man. He is a doctor. He is not the most strongest Jew in the world, sadly.”
“That’s what they need over there,” Sammy said. “Or, look at you, you got out. Maybe what they need is like a super-Kornblum. Hey.” He stood up and began to pound his right hand into the palm of his left. “Ooh. Ooh, ooh. Okay. Hold on a minute.” Now he pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. You could almost see the idea elbowing its way around the inside of his mind, like Athena in the cranium of Zeus. Joe sat up. He ran his mind back over the last half hour of conversation and, as if he were picking up a transmission direct from Sammy’s brain, saw in his own mind the outlines, the dark contours, the balletic contortions, of a costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape.* He was just envisioning or foretasting or, strangely, remembering this dashing character when Sammy opened his eyes. His face was twisted and flushed with excitement. He looked very much as if, to employ one of his own expressions, his bowels were in an uproar.
“Okay,” he said, “listen to this.” He started to pace between the drawing tables, looking down at his feet, declaiming in a sharp, barking tenor that Joe recognized from the announcers on American radio. “To, uh, to all those who, uh, toil in the bonds of slavery—”
“Bonds?”
“Yeah.” Sammy’s cheeks reddened, and he dropped the radio voice. “Chains, like. Just listen. It’s comics, all right?”
“All right.”
He resumed his pacing and radio-announcer tone and continued to compose his historic series of exclamations.
“To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!” His delivery grew more assured now. “Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! He is”—he paused and threw Joe a helpless, gleeful glance, on the point of vanishing completely into his story now—“the Escapist!”
“‘The Escapist.’” Joe tried it out. It sounded magnificent to his un-schooled ear—someone trustworthy and useful and strong. “He is an escape artist in a costume. Who fights crime.”
“He doesn’t just fight it. He frees the world of it. He frees people, see? He comes in the darkest hour. He watches from the shadows. Guided only by the light from—the light from—”
“His Golden Key.”
“That’s great!”
“I see,” Joe said. The costume would be dark, dark blue, midnight blue, simple, functional, ornamented only with a skeleton-key emblem on the chest. Joe went over to one of the drawing tables and climbed onto the stool. He picked up a pencil and a sheet of paper and started to sketch rapidly, closing his inner eyelid and projecting against it, so to speak, the image of a lithe, acrobatic man who had just leaped into his mind, a man in the act of alighting, a gymnast dismounting the rings, his right heel about to meet the ground, his left leg raised and flexed at the knee, his arms thrown high, hands outspread, trying to get at the physics of the way a man moved, the give-and-take of sinews and muscle groups, to forge, in a way that no comic book artist yet had, an anatomical basis for grace and style.
“Wow,” Sammy said. “Wow, Joe. That’s good. That’s beautiful.”
“He is here to free the world,” said Joe.
“Exactly.”
“Permit me to ask a question to you.”
“Ask me anything. I got it all up here.” Sammy tapped his head in a cocky manner that reminded Joe almost painfully of Thomas; in the next minute, when Sammy heard Joe’s question, he looked crestfallen in exactly the same way.
“What is the why?” said Joe.
Sammy nodded slowly, then stopped.
“The why,” he said. “Shit.”
“You said—”
“I know, I know. I know what I said. All right.” He picked up his coat and grabbed the last package of cigarettes. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
* The still-fresh memory of Harry Houdini in the American mind thirteen years after his death—of his myth, his mysterious abilities, his physique, his feats, his dedicated hunting down and exposure of frauds and cheats—is a neglected source of the superhero idea in general; an argument in its favor, as it were.
THE CURTAIN ITSELF is legendary: its dimensions, its weight, its darker-than-chocolate color, the Continental fineness of its stuff. It hangs in thick ripples like frosting poured from the proscenium arch of the most famous theater in the most celebrated block of the world’s greatest city. Call it Empire City, home of the needle-tipped Excelsior Building, tallest ever built; home of the Statue of Liberation, on her island in the middle of Empire Bay, her sword raised in defiance to the tyrants of the world; and home also of the Empire Palace Theatre, whose fabled Black Curtain trembles now as, at stage right, the narrowest of fissures opens in the rich dark impasto of its velour. Through this narrow gap a boy peers out. His face, ordinarily a trusting blank surmounted by tousled yellow curls, is creased with worry. He is not measuring the numbers of the audience—the house is sold out, as it has been for every night of the current engagement. He is looking for someone or something that no one will discuss, that he has only inferred, for the unnamed person or thing whose advent or presence has been troubling the company all day.
Then a hand as massive and hard as an elk’s horn, lashed by tough sinews to an arm like the limb of an oak, grabs the boy by the shoulder and drags him back into the wings.
“You know better, young man,” says the giant, well over