The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (26 page)

Within the covers of
Radio Comics
#4, it was revealed that the League of the Golden Key, depicted for the first time in its “secret mountain sanctum at the roof of the world,” had called, in this time of great urgency, for a rare convention of the scattered masters of the globe. There was a Chinese master, a Dutch master, a Polish master, a master in a fur hood who might perhaps have been a Lapp. The assembled
masters seemed mostly to be elderly, even gnomelike men. All agreed that our guy, Tom Mayflower, though he was new at the game and still young, was fighting the hardest and accomplishing the most of any of them. It was therefore voted to declare him “an emergency CHAMPION OF FREEDOM.” The power of Tom Mayflower’s key was increased twentyfold. He found that he now could peel the skin from an airplane, lasso a submarine with a steel cable borrowed from a nearby bridge, or tie the obligatory superheroic love knot in a battery of antiaircraft guns. He also developed an improvement on the old Ching Ling Soo trick of catching bullets—the Escapist could catch artillery shells. It hurt, and he would be knocked flat, but he could do it, staggering to his feet afterward and saying something like “I’d like to see Gabby Hartnett do
that
!”

From that point on, it had been total war. The Escapist and his gang fought on land, at sea, in the skies of Fortress Europa, and the punishment taken by the minions of the Iron Chain grew operatically intense. It soon became clear to Sammy, however, that if Joe’s monthly allotment of pages was not increased—if he was not kept fighting, round the clock—his cousin might be overcome by the imprisoning futility of his rage. Around this time, fortunately, the first complete circulation figures for
Radio Comics
#2 had come in at well in excess of half a million. Sammy immediately made the natural proposal of adding a second title to the line; Anapol and Ashkenazy, after the briefest of conferences, authorized the addition of two, to be called
Triumph Comics
and
The Monitor
. Sammy and Joe went for a series of long strolls, in and out of the streets of Manhattan and Empire City, talking and dreaming and walking in circles in the prescribed manner of golem makers. When they returned from the last of these arcane strolls, they had brought forth the Monitor, Mr. Machine Gun, and Dr. E. Pluribus Hewnham, the Scientific American, filling out both books with characters drawn by the now regular Empire stable: Gold, the Glovskys, Pantaleone. Both titles had, as Sammy had once predicted, killed; and Joe had soon found himself responsible every month for more than two hundred pages of art and wholesale imaginary slaughter on a scale that, many years later, could still horrify the good Dr. Fredric Wertham when he set about to probe at the violent foundations of the comics.

“Jesus Christ,” Anapol said, wincing. He had reached the point, toward the end of the story, in which the Escapist went to work on the massed panzer divisions and storm troopers of the Wehrmacht. “Ouch.”

“Yes.”

Anapol pointed with a thick finger. “Is that a
bone
sticking out of the guy’s arm?”

“It is meant to suggest this.”

“Can we
show
a bone sticking out of a human arm?”

Joe shrugged. “I could erase it.”

“Don’t erase it, just … Jesus.”

Anapol looked, as he generally did when he inspected Joe’s work, as if he was going to be sick. Sammy had reassured Joe, however, that it was not disgust at the violence portrayed but at the awareness, always for some reason painful to Anapol, of how big the latest Escapist donnybrook was going to go over with the remarkably bloodthirsty children of America.

It was Joe’s battle scenes—the type of panel or sequence known in the trade as a slugfest—that first got his work noticed, both in the business and by the boggled young manhood of America. These scenes have been described as wild, frenetic, violent, extreme, even Breughelian. There is smoke, fire, and lightning. There are thick flocks of bombers, spiky flotillas of battleships, gardens of blooming shell bursts. Up in one corner, a bombed-out castle looms stark on a hill. Down in another corner, a grenade is exploding in a henhouse as chickens and eggs go flying. Messerschmitts dive, finned torpedoes plow up the surf. And somewhere in the middle of it all struggles the Escapist, lashed with naval chain to the business end of a prescient Axis rocket bomb.

“One of these days you’re going to go too far,” Anapol said, shaking his head. He put the stack of Bristol board back together and started toward his office. “Somebody is going to get hurt.”

“Somebody is getting hurt already,” Joe reminded him.

“Well, not around here.” Anapol unlocked his door and went in. Joe followed uninvited. He wanted Anapol to understand the importance of the fight, to succumb to the propaganda that he and Sammy were unabashedly churning out. If they could not move Americans to anger
against Hitler, then Joe’s existence, the mysterious freedom that had been granted to him and denied to so many others, had no meaning.

Anapol looked around at the meager furnishings of his office, the sagging shelves, the desk lamp with its cracked shade, as if he had never seen them before.

“This place
is
a dump,” he said, nodding, as if agreeing with some inaudible critic, possibly, Joe thought, his wife. “I’m glad we’re getting out of here.”

“Did you hear about Vichy?” Joe said. “The laws they passed?”

Anapol set a paper bag down on his desk and opened it. He took out a net sack filled with oranges.

“No, I did not,” he said. “Florida orange?”

“They are planning to restrict the Jews there.”

“That’s terrible,” Anapol said, handing him an orange. Joe put it into the hip pocket of his trousers. “I still can’t believe I’m going to be in the
Empire State Building
.” His eyes developed a faraway glaze. “Empire Comics, Empire State Building, you see the connection?”

“As also they have such laws as these in Czechoslovakia.”

“I know. They’re animals. You’re right. Tell me, what do you hear from your family?”

“The usual,” Joe said. Envelopes bearing the strange Dlouha Street address arrived at a rate of about two a month, his mother’s scratchy, baroque hand tattooed over with swastikas and eagles. There was often nothing at all in these letters in the way of news; they had been emptied of information by the censor. Joe was obliged to type his replies, because although on the comics page he had one of the steadiest lines in the business, when he sat down to write his brother—most of his letters were addressed to Thomas—his hand shook too violently to hold a pen. His missives were terse, as if to forestall the incoherence of emotion. In each one, he begged Thomas not to despair, assured him that he had not forgotten his promise, and that he was doing everything he could to get them all to New York. “Not anything is different.”

“Look,” Anapol said. “I won’t stop you from cutting their goddamned heads off if that’s what you want to do, as long as it sells enough comic books. You know that.”

“I know.”

“It’s just … it makes me nervous.”

The entire phenomenon of comic books, as it had turned out, made Anapol a little nervous. For fifteen years he’d broken his back traveling to the remote, humorless hinterlands of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He had slept little, flirted with bankruptcy, driven six hundred miles a day, eaten appalling food, developed an ulcer, neglected his daughters, and worked his ass off trying to get novelty dealers to laugh. Now, suddenly, having done nothing more than allow himself to be persuaded by someone he had hitherto considered a young maniac to put up seven thousand dollars he could just barely afford, he was rich. All of the tables and equations for calculating the nature of the world had been thrown into question. He had broken off his affair with Maura Zell, moved back in with his wife, attended High Holiday services for the first time in forty years.

“I’m worried about
you
, Kavalier,” he went on. “I suppose it can only be healthy for you to get your killer instincts or what have you out of your system that way”—he gestured vaguely toward the studio room—“but I can’t help thinking that in the long run it’s only going to make you … make you …” He seemed to lose his train of thought. He had been rummaging inside the paper bag, taking out various other souvenirs of his trip. There was a conch shell with its lush pink lip. There was a grinning monkey head made out of two coconut halves. And there was a framed photograph of a house, the colors hand-tinted and garish. The house in the picture stood on a patch of vibrant emerald lawn. The sky behind it was lurid blue. It was a modernistic house, low and flat and pale gray, charming as a carton of eggs. Anapol stood the photograph on his desk, beside the pictures of his wife and daughters. The frame was sober, plain black enamel, as if to suggest that the picture it contained was a document of rare importance, a diploma or government license.

“What is that?” Joe said.

Anapol blinked, looking at the picture. “That is my house in Florida,” he said, sounding tentative.

“I thought you went to a hotel.”

Anapol nodded. He looked queasy and happy and doubtful all at the same time. “We did. The Delano.”

“You bought a
house
there?”

“Apparently. It seems crazy to me now.” He pointed to the picture. “That isn’t even my house. There is no house. There’s just a piece of muddy sand with string tied around it on little sticks. In the middle of Palm River, Florida. Only there is no Palm River, either.”

“You went to Florida and bought a house.”

“Why don’t I like the way you keep repeating it? Why do I feel like you’re accusing me of something? Are you saying I don’t have a right to throw my money away on whatever I damn well feel like, Kavalier?”

“No, sir,” Joe said. “I would not dream.” He yawned, a deep, joint-tightening yawn that made his entire body shudder. He was exhausted, but the yawn that racked him was the product of his anger and not his fatigue. The only people winning the war that Joe had been fighting in the pages of Empire Comics since January were Sheldon Anapol and Jack Ashkenazy. Between them, they had pocketed something in the neighborhood, according to Sammy’s guess, of six hundred thousand dollars. “Excuse me.”

“That’s right,” Anapol said. “Go home. Get some sleep. You look like hell.”

“I have an appointment,” Joe said stiffly. He put on his hat and slung his jacket over his shoulder. “Goodbye.”

U
NDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES
, the trip downtown to the German consulate discouraged Joe; today he found it difficult even to get himself on to the subway. He felt obscurely furious with Sheldon Anapol. He took a comic book out of the hip pocket of his jacket and tried to read. He had become a constant and careful consumer of comic books. By stalking the Fourth Avenue bookstalls, he had managed to acquire a copy of nearly every one that had been published in the past few years, acquiring also, while he was at it, stacks of old Sunday
New York Mirror
s so that he could study Burne Hogarth’s vehement, precise, and painterly work in
Tarzan
. The same masturbatory intensity of concentration that Joe had once brought to the study of magic and wireless sets he now focused on the fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form into whose raffish embrace he had fallen. He noticed how strong the influence of movies was on artists like Joe Shuster and
Batman
’s Bob Kane, and began to experiment with a cinematic vocabulary: an extreme close-up, say, on the face of a terrified child or soldier, or a zoom shot, drawing ever closer, over the course of four panels, on the battlements and keep of a grim Zothenian redoubt. From Hogarth he learned to trouble over the emotional occasion, so to speak, of a panel, choosing carefully, among the infinitude of potential instants to arrest and depict, the one in which the characters’ emotions were most extreme. And from reading the comic books that featured art by the great Louis Fine, like the one in his hands right now, Joe learned to view the comic book hero, in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not
all
violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier & Clay; Joe’s work also
articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.

Today, however, he could not seem to focus on the copy of
Wonderworld Comics
that he had brought along. His thoughts veered between irritation with the giddiness, the indecency, of Anapol’s sudden prosperity and dread of his appointment with the Adjutant for Minority Relocation at the German consulate on Whitehall Street. It was not the prosperity itself he resented, for that was a measure of his and Sammy’s success, but rather the disproportionate share of it that was going to Anapol and Ashkenazy, when it was he and Sammy who had invented the Escapist and were doing all the work of bringing him to life. No, it was not even that. It was the impotence of the money, and of all the pent-up warlike fancies that had earned it, to do anything but elaborate the wardrobe and fatten the financial portfolios of the owners of Empire Comics that so frustrated and enraged him. And there was nothing guaranteed to emphasize his fundamental powerlessness more thoroughly than a morning spent with Adjutant Milde at the German consulate. There was no pursuit more disheartening than the immigration goose chase.