"I guess this was the point," he said. "For me to come back. To end up sitting here with you, on Long Island, in this house, eating some noodles that Rosa made."

Sammy raised his eyebrows and let out a short sigh. Rosa shook her head. It seemed to be her destiny to live among men whose solutions were invariably more complicated or extreme than the problems they were intended to solve.

"Couldn't you have just called?" Rosa said. "I'm sure I would have invited you."

Joe shook his head, and the color returned to his cheeks. "I couldn't. So many times I wanted to. I would call you and hang up the phone. I would write letters but didn't send them. And the longer I waited, the harder it became to imagine. I just didn't know how to do it, you see? I didn't know what you would think of me. How you would feel about me."

"Christ, Joe, you fucking idiot," Sammy said. "We love you."

Joe put his hand on Sammy's shoulder and shrugged, nodding as if to say, yes, he had acted like an idiot. And that would be it for them, Rosa thought. Twelve years of nothing, a curt declaration, a shrug of apology, and those two would be as good as new. Rosa snorted a jet of smoke through her nostrils and shook her head. Joe and Sammy turned to her. They seemed to be expecting her to come up with a plan of action for them, a nice tight Rose Saxon script they could all follow, in which they would all get just the lines they wanted.

"Well?" she said. "What do we do now?"

The silence that ensued was long enough for three or four of Ethel Klayman's proverbial idiots to enter this woebegone world. Rosa could see a thousand possible replies working themselves through her husband's mind, and she wondered which one of them he was finally going to offer, but it was Joe who finally spoke up.

"Is there any dessert?" he said.

12

WITH ASHARPENED Ticonderoga tucked behind his ear and a fresh yellow lawyer's pad pressed to his chest, Sammy got into bed with her. He wore a pair of stiff cotton pajamas—these were white with a thin lime stripe and a diagonal pattern of gold stags' heads—to which clung a sweet steam whiff of her iron. Normally he folded into the envelope of their bed an olfactory transcript of his day in the city, a rich record of Vitalis, Pall Mall, German mustard, the sour imprint of his leather-backed office chair, the scorched quarter-inch membrane of coffee at the bottom of the company urn, but tonight he had showered, and his cheeks and throat had a stinging mint smell of Lifebuoy. He transferred his relatively slight bulk from the floor of the bedroom to the surface of the mattress with the usual recitative of grunts and sighs. At one time Rosa would have inquired as to whether there was some general or specific cause for these amazing performances, but there never was—his groaning was either some involuntary musical response to the effects of gravitation, like the "singing" of certain moisture-laden rocks that she had read about in Ripley's, produced by the first shafts of morning sun; or else it was just the inevitable nightly release, after fifteen hours spent ignoring and repressing them, of all the day's frustrations. She waited out the elaborate process by which he effected a comprehensive rearranging of the mucus in his lungs and throat. She felt him settle his legs and smooth the covers over them. At last she rolled over and sat up on one arm.

"Well?" she said.

Given everything that had happened that day, there were a lot of different possible answers to her question. Sammy might have said, "Apparently our son is not, after all, a little school-skipping, comic-book-corrupted delinquent right out of the most lurid chapters of Seduction of the Innocent." Or, for the thousandth time, with the usual admixture of wonder and hostility: "Your father is quite a character." Or—she dreaded and longed to hear it: "Well, you got him back."

But he just snuffled one last time and said, "I like it."

Rosa sat up a little bit more.

"Really?"

He nodded, folding his hands behind his head. "It's very disturbing," he continued, and she realized that she had known all along that this was the answer she was going to get, or rather that this would be the line he would probably choose to take in reply to her open-ended invitation to fill her with longing and dread. She was, as always, anxious for his opinion of her work, and grateful, too, that he wanted to reckon things between them, for just a little longer, by the old calendar, as rife with lacunae and miscalculations as it may have been. "It's like the Bomb really is the Other Woman."

"The Bomb is sexy."

"That's what's disturbing," Sammy said. "Actually, what's disturbing is that you could think such a thing."

"Look who's talking."

"You gave the Bomb a figure. A womanly shape."

"That comes right out of Tommy's World Book. I didn't make that up."

Sammy lit a cigarette and then stared at the match head until it burned down almost to the skin of his fingers. He shook it out.

"Is he out of his mind?" he said.

"Tommy or Joe?"

"He's been leading a secret life for the last ten years. I mean, but really. Disguises. Assumed names. He told me only a dozen people knew who he was. Nobody knew where he lived."

"Who knew?"

"A bunch of those magicians. That's where Tommy first saw him. In the back room at Tannen's."

"Louis Tannen's Magic Shop," she said. That explained the intensity of Tommy's attachment, which had always irritated her, to that shabby cabinet of trite tricks and flummery, which, the time she had visited it, had left her feeling depressed. He seems quite obsessed with the place, her father had once observed. She crept back now along the span of lies that Tommy had stretched across the last ten months. The carefully typed price lists, all fakes. Perhaps the interest in magic itself had all been faked. And the perfect simulacra of her signature, on those appalling excuse notes that Tommy concocted: of course it was Joe who had done them. Tommy's own signature was brambly and uncouth; his hand was still decidedly wobbly. Why hadn't it occurred to her before that the boy never could have produced such a forgery on his own? "They were pulling a giant sleight of hand on us. The eye patch was like, what did Joe used to call it?"

"Misdirection."

"A lie to cover a lie."

"I asked Joe about Orson Welles," Sammy said. "He knew."

She pointed to the pack of cigarettes, and Sammy handed her one. She was sitting up now, legs crossed, facing him. Her stomach hurt; that was nerves. Nerves, and the impact of years and years of accumulated fantasies collapsing all at once, toppling like a row of painted flats. She had imagined Joe not merely run down by passing trucks on a lonely road but drowned in remote Alaskan inlets, shot by Klansmen, tagged in a drawer in a midwestern morgue, killed in a jail riot, and in any number of various suicidal predicaments from hanging to defenestration. She could not help it. She had a catastrophic imagination; an air of imminent doom darkens much of even her sunniest work. She had guessed at the presence of violence in the story of Joe's disappearance (though she had mistakenly thought it lay at the end and not the beginning of the tale). One heard more and more of suicides—suffering from "survivor's guilt," as it was called—among the more fortunate relatives of those who had died in the camps. Whenever Rosa read or was told of such a case, she could not prevent herself from picturing Joe performing the same act, by the same means; usually it was pills or the horrible irony of gas. And every newspaper account of somebody's ill fate in the hinterlands—the man she had read about just yesterday tumbled from a sea cliff at the edge of San Francisco—she recast with Joe in the lead. Bear maulings, bee attacks, the plunge of a bus full of schoolchildren (he was at the wheel)—the memory of Joe underwent them all. No tragedy was too baroque or seemingly inapplicable for her to conceive of fitting Joe into it. And she had lived daily, for several years now, with the pain of knowing—knowing—all fantasy aside, that Joe really would never be coming home. But she could not seem to get hold, now, of the apparently simple idea that Joe Kavalier, secret life and all, was asleep on her couch, in her living room, under an old knit afghan of Ethel Klayman's.

"No," she said. "I don't think he's out of his mind. You know? I just don't know if there's a sane reaction to what he ... what happened to his family. Is your reaction, and mine ... you get up, you go to work, you have a catch in the yard with the kid on Sunday afternoon. How sane is that? Just to go on planting bulbs and drawing comic books and doing all the same old crap as if none of it had happened?"

"Good point," Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like "How sane are we?" and "Do our lives have meaning?" The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.

"What is that?" she said.

"Weird Planet." He did not lift his pencil from the pad. "Guy lands on a planet. Exploring the galaxy. Mapping the far fringes." While he spoke, he did not look at her, or interrupt the steady progress across the ruled lines of the tiny bold block letters he produced, regular and neat, as if he had a typewriter hand. He liked to talk through his plots for her, combing out into regular plaits what grew in wild tufts in his mind. "He finds a vast golden city. Like nothing he's ever seen. And he's seen it all. The beehive cities of Deneba. The lily-pad cities of Lyra. The people here are ten feet tall, beautiful golden humanoids. Let's say they have big wings. They welcome Spaceman Jones. They show him around. But something is on their minds. They're worried. They're afraid. There's one building, one immense palace he isn't allowed to see. One night our guy wakes up in his nice big bed, the entire city is shaking. He hears this terrible bellowing, raging like some immense monstrous beast. Screams. Strange electric flashes. It's all coming from the palace." He peeled the page he had filled, folded it over, plastered it down. Went on. "The next day everybody acts like nothing happened. They tell him he must have been dreaming. Naturally our guy has to find out. He's an explorer. It's his job. So he sneaks into this one huge, deserted palace and looks around. In the highest tower, a mile above the planet, he comes upon a giant. Twenty feet tall, huge wings, golden like the others but with ragged hair, big long beard. In chains. Giant atomic chains."

She waited while he waited for her to ask.

"And?" she said finally.

"We're in heaven, this planet," said Sam.

"I'm not sure I—"

"It's God."

"Okay."

"God is a madman. He lost his mind, like, a billion years ago. Just before He, you know. Created the universe."

It was Rosa's turn to say, "I like it. Does He, what? I'm guessing he eats the spaceman?"

"He does."

"Peels him like a banana."

"You want to draw it?"

She reached out and laid a hand on his cheek. It was warm and still dewy from the shower, his stubble pleasantly scratchy under her fingertips. She wondered how long it had been since she had last touched his face.

"Sam, come on. Stop for a minute," she said.

"I need to get this down."

She reached out for the pencil and arrested its mechanical progress. For a moment he fought her; there was a tiny creaking of splinters, and the pencil began to bend. Finally, it snapped in two, splitting lengthwise. She handed him her half, the skinny gray tube of graphite glinting like mercury rising in a thermometer.

"Sammy, how did you get him off?"

"I told you."

"My father called the mayor's mother," Rosa said. "Who was able to manipulate the criminal-justice system of New York City. Which she did out of her deep love of Rene Magritte."

"Apparently."

"Bullshit."

He shrugged, but she knew he was lying. He had been lying to her steadily, and with her approval, for years. It was a single, continuous lie, the deepest kind of lie possible in a marriage: the one that need never be told, because it will never be questioned. Every once in a while, however, small bergs like this one would break off and drift across their course, mementos of the trackless continent of lies, the blank spot on their maps.

"How did you get him off?" Rosa said. She had never before so persisted in trying to get the truth out of him. Sometimes she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, married to a man with contacts in the underground. The lies were for her protection as well as his.

"I talked to the arresting officer," Sammy said, looking steadily at her. "Detective Lieber."

"You spoke to him."

"He seemed like an all right kind of guy."

"That's lucky."

"We're going to have lunch."

Sammy had been having lunch, on and off, with a dozen men over the past dozen years or so. They rarely displayed any last names in his conversation; they were just Bob or Jim or Pete or Dick. One would appear on the fringes of Rosa's consciousness, hang around for six months or a year, a vague mishmash of stock tips, opinions, and vogue jokes in a gray suit, then vanish as quickly as he had come. Rosa always assumed that these friendships of Sammy's—the only relations, since Joe's enlistment, that merited the name—went no further than a lunch table at Le Marmiton or Laurent. It was one of her fundamental assumptions.

"Well then, maybe Daddy can help you out with this Senate committee, too," Rosa said. "I'll bet Estes Kefauver is a terrific Max Ernst fan."

"Maybe we should just get hold of Max Ernst," Sammy said. "I need all the help I can get."

"Are they calling in everyone?" Rosa said.

Sammy shook his head. He was trying not to look worried, but she could tell that he was. "I made some calls," he said. "Gaines and I seem to be the only comics men that anyone knows they're calling."

Bill Gaines was the publisher and chief pontiff of Entertainment Comics. He was a slovenly, brilliant guy, excitable and voluble the way that Sammy was—when the subject was work—and, like Sammy, he harbored ambitions. His comic books had literary pretensions and strove to find readers who would appreciate their irony, their humor, their bizarre and pious brand of liberal morality. They were also shockingly gruesome. Corpses and dismemberments and vivid stabbings abounded. Awful people did terrible things to their horrible loved ones and friends. Rosa had never liked Gaines or his books very much, though she adored Bernard Krigstein, one of the E.C. regulars, refined and elegant in both print and person and a daring manipulator of panels.

"Some of your stuff is pretty violent, Sam," she said. "Pretty close to the limit."

"It might not be the stabbings and vivisections," Sammy said. And then, licking his lips, "At least not only that."

She waited.

"There's, well, there's, sort of a whole chapter on me in Seduction of the Innocent."

"There is?"

"Part of a chapter. Several pages."

"And you never told me this?"

"You said you weren't going to read the damn thing. I figured you didn't want to know."

"I asked you if Dr. Wertham mentioned you. You said ..." She tried to remember what exactly he had said. "You said that you looked, and you weren't in the index."

"Well, not by name," Sammy said. "That's what I meant."

"I see," Rosa said. "But it turns out there is a whole, actual chapter about you."

"It's not about me personally. It doesn't even identify me by name. It just talks about stories I wrote. The Lumberjack. The Rectifier. But not just mine. There's a lot about Batman. And Robin. There's stuff about Wonder Woman. About how she's a little ... a little on the butch side."

"Uh-huh. I see." Everyone knew. That was what made their particular secret, their lie, so ironic; it went unspoken, unchallenged, and yet it did not manage to deceive. There was gossip in the neighborhood; Rosa had never heard it, but she could feel it sometimes, smell it lingering in the air of a living room that she and Sam had just entered. "Does the U.S. Senate know that you wrote these stories?"

"I seriously doubt it," Sammy said. "It was all nom de plume."

"Well, then."

"I'll be fine." He reached for his pad again, then rolled over and rifled the nightstand drawer for another pencil. But when he was back under the covers, he just sat there, drumming with the eraser end on the pad.

"Think he'll stay for a while?" he said.

"No. Uh-uh. Maybe. I don't know. Do we want him to stay?" she said.

"Do you still love him?" He was trying to catch her off guard, lawyer-style. But she was not going to venture so far, not yet, nor poke so deeply into the embers of her love for Joe.

"Do you?" she said, and then, before he could begin to take the question seriously, she went on, "Do you still love me?"

"You know I do," he said at once. Actually, she knew that he did. "You don't have to ask."

"And you don't have to tell me," she said. She kissed him. It was a curt and sisterly kiss. Then she switched off her light and turned her face to the wall. The scratching of his pencil resumed. She closed her eyes, but she could not relax. It took her very little time to realize that somehow she had forgotten the one thing she had wanted to talk to Sammy about: Tommy.

"He knows that you adopted him," she said. "According to Joe." The pencil stopped. Rosa kept her face to the wall. "He knows that somebody else is really his dad. He just doesn't know who."

"Joe never told him, then."

"Would he?"

"No," said Sammy. "I guess he wouldn't."

"We have to tell him the truth, Sam," Rosa said. "The time has come. It's time."

"I'm working now," Sammy said. "I'm not going to talk about this anymore."

She knew from long experience to believe this. The conversation had officially come to an end. And she had not said anything that she wanted to say to him! She put a hand on his warm shoulder and left it there a little while. Again, there was a tiny shock of remembered coolness at the touch of his skin.

"What about you?" she said, just before she finally drifted off to sleep. "Are you going to stay for a while?"

But if there was a reply, she missed it.

13

AT THIRTY-FIVE, with incipient wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a voice grown husky with cigarettes, Rosa Clay was, if anything, more beautiful than the girl Joe remembered. She had surrendered her futile and wrongheaded battle against the ample construction of her frame. The general expansion of her rosy flesh had softened the dramatic rake of her nose, the equine length of her jaw, the flare of her cheekbones. Her thighs had a grandeur, and her hips were capacious, and in those first few days, a great goad to his renascent love was the glimpse of her pale, freckled breasts, brimming from the cups of her brassiere with a tantalizing but fictitious threat of spilling over, that was afforded him by one of her housedresses, or by a chance late-night encounter outside the bathroom in the hall. He had thought of Rosa countless times over the years of his flight, but somehow, courting or embracing her in his memory, he had neglected to dab in the freckles with which she was so prodigiously stippled, and now he was startled by their profusion. They emerged and faded against her skin with the inscrutable cadence of stars on the night sky. They invited the touch of fingers as painfully as the nap of velvet or the shimmer of a piece of watered silk.

Sitting at the breakfast table, lying on the couch, he would watch as she went about her household business, carrying a dust mop or a canvas bag of clothespins, her skirt straining to contain the determined sway of her hips and buttocks, and feel as if inside him a violin string were being tightened on its key. Because, as it turned out, he was still in love with Rosa. His love for her had survived the ice age intact, like the beasts from vanished aeons that were always thawing out in the pages of comic books and going on rampages through the streets of Metropolis and Gotham and Empire City. This love, thawing, gave off a rich mastodon odor of the past. He was surprised to eneounter these feelings again—not by their having survived so much as by their undeniable vividness and force. A man in love at twenty feels more alive than he ever will again—finding himself once more in possession of this buried treasure, Joe saw more clearly than ever that for the past dozen years or so, he had been, more or less, a dead man. His daily fried egg and pork chop, his collection of false beards and mustaches, the hasty sponge-baths by the sink in the closet, these regular, unquestioned features of his recent existence, now seemed the behaviors of a shadow, the impressions left by a strange novel read under the influence of a high fever.

The return of his feelings for Rosa—of his very youth itself—after so long a disappearance ought to have been a cause for delight, but Joe felt terribly guilty about it. He did not want to be that twinkle-eyed, ascot-wearing, Fiat-driving mainstay of Rosa's stories, the home-wrecker. In the past few days, he had, it was true, lost all his illusions about Sammy and Rosa's marriage (which, as we tend to do with missed opportunities, he had, over the years, come to idealize). The solid suburban bond that he had, from a distance, half-ruefully and half-contentedly conjured to himself at night, proved, at close range, to be even more than ordinarily complicated and problematic. But whatever the state of things between them, Sammy and Rosa were married, and had been so for quite a few years. They were unmistakably a couple. They spoke alike, employing a household slang—"pea-bee and jay," "idiot box"— talking on top of each other, finishing each other's sentences, amiably cutting each other off. Sometimes they both went at Joe at the same time, telling parallel, complementary versions of the same story, and Joe would become lost in the somewhat tedious marital intricacy of their conversation. Sammy made tea for Rosa and brought it to her in her studio. She ironed his shirt with grim precision every night before she retired. And they had evolved a remarkable system of producing comic books as a couple (though they rarely collaborated outright on a story as Clay & Clay). Sammy brought forth items from the inexhaustible stock of cheap, reliable, and efficient ideas that God had supplied him with at birth, and then Rosa talked him through a plot, supplying him with a constant stream of refinements that neither of them seemed to realize were coming from her. And Sammy went over the pages of her own stories with her, panel by panel, criticizing her drawing when it got too elaborate, coaxing her into maintaining the simple strong line, stylized, impatient with detail, that was her forte. Rosa and Sam were not together much—except in bed, a place that remained a source of great mystery and interest to Joe—but when they were, they seemed to be very involved with each other.

So it was unthinkable that he should interpose himself and make the claim his reawakened love urged upon him; but he could think of nothing else, and thus he went around the house in a constant state of inflamed embarrassment. In the hospital in Cuba, he had conceived a grateful ardor for one of the nurses, a pretty ex-socialite from Houston known as Alexis from Texas, and had spent an excruciating month in the arid heat of Guantanamo Bay trying to keep himself from getting an erection every time she came around to sponge him down. It was like that with Rosa now. He spent all of his time squelching his thoughts, tamping down his feelings. There was an ache in the hinge of his jaw.

Furthermore, he sensed that she was avoiding him, shunning beforehand the unwelcome advances he could not bring himself to make, which caused him to feel like even more of a heel. After their initial conversation in the kitchen, he and Rosa seemed to find it hard to get a second one started. For a while, he was so preoccupied by his clumsy attempts at small talk that he failed to remark her own reticence whenever they were alone. When he finally did notice it, he attributed her silence to animosity. For days, he stood in the cold shower of her imagined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved. Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he might go off in a failed pursuit of an impossible revenge; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her—so he imagined that she imagined—in all those years away. The expanding gas of silence between them only excited his shame and lust the more. In the absence of verbal intercourse, he became hyperaware of other signs of her—the jumble of her makeups and creams and lotions in the bathroom, the Spanish moss of her lingerie dangling from the shower-curtain rod, the irritable tinkle of her spoon against her teacup from the garage, messages from the kitchen written in oregano, bacon, onions cooked in fat.

At last, when he could stand it no longer, he decided he had to say something, but the only thing he could think of to say was Please forgive me. He would make a formal apology, as long and abject as need be, and throw himself on her mercy. He mulled and planned and rehearsed his words, and when he happened to be passing her in the narrow hallway, Joe just blurted it out.

"Look," he said, "I'm sorry."

"What did you do?"

"I'm sorry for everything, I mean."

"Oh. That," she said. "All right."

"I know you must be angry."

She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him, brow wide and smooth, lips compressed into a doubtful pout. He could not read the expression in her eyes—it kept changing. Finally, she looked down at her freckled arms, rosy and flushed.

"I have no right to be."

"I hurt your feelings. I abandoned you. I left Sammy to do my job."

"I don't hold that against you," she said. "Not at all. And neither does he, I don't think, not really. We both understand why you left. We understood then."

"Thank you," Joe said. "Maybe you can explain it to me sometimes."

"It was when you didn't come home, Joe. It was when you jumped overboard, or whatever it was you did."

"I'm sorry for that, too."

"That was something that was very hard for me to understand."

He reached for her hand, taken aback by his own daring. She let him hold it for nine seconds, then reclaimed it. Her eyes crossed a little with reproach.

"I didn't know how to come back to you," he said. "I was trying for years, believe me."

He was surprised suddenly to find her mouth on his. He put his hand on her heavy breast. They fell sideways against the paneled wall, dislodging a photograph of Ethel Klayman from its nail. Joe began to dig around inside the zipper fly of her jeans. The metal teeth bit into his wrist. He was sure that she was going to pull down her jeans and he was going to climb on top of her, right there in the hallway before Tommy came home from school. He had been wrong all along; it was not anger that she had interposed between them but the pane of an inexpressible longing like his own. Then the next thing he knew, they were standing up again in the middle of the hall, and the various sirens and air-raid beacons that had been going wild all around them seemed to have fallen silent abruptly. She replaced the various things he had left in disarray, zipped her trousers, smoothed her hair. The color on her lips had smeared all over her cheeks.

"Hum," she said. And then, "Maybe not yet."

"I understand," he said. "Please let me know." He meant it to sound patient and cooperative, but somehow it came out as abject. Rosa started to laugh. She put her arms around him, and he rubbed the smeared lipstick into her cheeks until it was gone.

"How did you do it, anyway?" she said. The tips of her teeth were stained with tea. "Get off the boat in the middle of the ocean, I mean."

"I was never on it," Joe said. "I went out on a plane the night before."

"There were orders. I don't know, medical certificates. Sammy showed me the photostats."

He put on a mysterious Cavalieri smile.

"Always true to the code," she said.

"It was very cleverly done."

"I'm sure it was, dear. You were always a clever boy."

He pressed his lips to the parting of her hair. It had an intriguing match-head smell of the Lapsang she preferred.

"What are we going to do?" he said.

She didn't answer at first. She let go and stepped away from him, head tilted to one side, arching a brow; a taunting look that he remembered very well from their previous time together.

"I have an idea," she said. "Why don't you try to figure out where we're going to put all your goddamned comic books?"

14

NINETY-FIVE,      NINETY-SIX,      N I N ET Y-S E VE N.      NINETY-SEVEN." "A hundred and two."

"I count ninety-seven."

"You miscounted."

"We're going to need a truck."

"This is what I have been telling you."

"A truck and then a whole fucking warehouse."

"I've always wanted a warehouse," Joe said. "That's always been the dream of mine."

Though Joe preferred to remain vague on the subject of just how many comic books, crammed into pine crates of his own manufacture— complete runs of Action and Detective, Blackhawk and Captain America, of Crime Does Not Pay and Justice Traps the Guilty, of Classics Illustrated and Picture Stories from the Bible, of Whiz and Wow and Zip and Zoot and Smash and Crash and Pep and Punch, of Amazing and Thrilling and Terrific and Popular—he actually owned, there was nothing at all vague about the letter he had received from lawyers representing Realty Associates Securities Corporation, the owners of the Empire State Building. Kornblum Vanishing Creams, Inc., had been evicted for violating the terms of its lease, which meant that the ninety-seven or one hundred and two wooden crates, filled with comic books, that Joe had amassed— along with all of his other belongings—must either be transported or disposed of.

"So toss 'em," Sammy said. "What's the big deal?"

Joe sighed. Although all the world—even Sammy Clay, who had spent most of his adult life making and selling them—viewed them as trash, Joe loved his comic books: for their inferior color separation, their poorly trimmed paper stock, their ads for air rifles and dance courses and acne creams, for the basement smell that clung to the older ones, the ones that had been in storage during Joe's travels. Most of all, he loved them for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art. Comic books had sustained his sanity during his time on the psychiatric ward at Gitmo. For the whole of the fall and winter following his return to the mainland, which Joe spent shivering in a rented cabin on the beach at Chincoteague, Virginia, with the wind whistling in through the chinks in the clapboard, half-poisoned by the burned-hair smell of an old electric heater, it was only ten thousand Old Gold cigarettes and a pile of Captain Marvel Adventures (comprising the incredible twenty-four-month epic struggle between the Captain and a telepathic, world-conquering earthworm, Mr. Mind) that had enabled Joe to fight off, once and for all, the craving for morphine with which he had returned from the Ice.

Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of Betty and Veronica that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mystery of the two big-toothed, wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in these terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality— that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.

"I know you think it's all just crap," he said. "But you should not of all people think this."

"Yeah, yeah," Sammy said. "Okay."

"What are you looking at?"

Sammy had edged his way out into Miss Smyslenka's office and was untying one of the stacked portfolios. At nine o'clock that morning, on his way into the Pharaoh offices, he had dropped Joe off here, to begin the laborious process of clearing himself out. It was nearly eight P.M. now, and Joe had been dragging, packing, and repacking, without a break, all day. His shoulders ached, and his fingertips were raw, and he was feeling out of sorts. It had been disorienting to come back here and. find everything as he had left it—and then to have to begin to dismantle it. And he was stung by the look in Sammy's eye just now when he walked in and found Joe still at work, finishing the job. Sammy had looked pleasantly surprised—not that the job was finished, Joe thought, so much as to find that Joe was still there. They all thought—all three of them—that he was going to leave them again.

"I'm just taking another look at these pages of yours," Sammy said. "This is beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. I'm really looking forward to reading it all."

"I don't think you will like that. Probably nobody will like that. Too dark."

"It does seem dark."

"Too dark for a comic book, I think."

"Is this the beginning? God, look at that splash." Sammy, his overcoat slung over one arm, sank to the floor beside the broad pile of black cardboard portfolios that they had bought this morning at Pearl Paints, so that Joe could pack up his five years of work. His voice turned dark and cobwebbed. "The Golem!" He shook his head, studying the first splash page—there were forty-seven splash pages in all—at the head of the first chapter of the 2,256-page comic book that Joe had produced during his time at Kornblum Vanishing Creams; he had just begun work on the forty-eighth and final chapter when Tommy gave him up to the authorities.

Joe had arrived in New York in the fall of 1949 with a twofold intention: to begin work on a long story about the Golem, which had been coming to him, panel by panel and chapter by chapter, in his dreams, in diners, on long bus rides all across the south and northwest, since he had set out from Chincoteague three years before; and, gradually, carefully, even at first perhaps stealthily, to see Rosa again. He had reestablished a few tentative connections to the city—renting an office in the Empire State Building, resuming his visits to the back room at Louis Tannen's, opening an account at Pearl Paints—and then settled in to implement his double plan. But while he had gotten off to a fine and rapid start on the work that would, he hoped at the time, transform people's views and understanding of the art form that in 1949 he alone saw as a means of self-expression as potent as a Cole Porter tune in the hands of a Lester Young, or a cheap melodrama about an unhappy rich man in the hands of an Orson Welles, it proved much harder for him to return himself, even a little at a time, to the orbit of Rosa Saks Clay. The Golem was going so well; it absorbed all of his time and attention. And as he immersed himself ever deeper into its potent motifs of Prague and its Jews, of magic and murder, persecution and liberation, guilt that could not be expiated and innocence that never stood a chance—as he dreamed, night after night at his drawing table, the long and hallucinatory tale of a wayward, unnatural child, Josef Golem, that sacrificed itself to save and redeem the little lamplit world whose safety had been entrusted to it, Joe came to feel that the work—telling this story—was helping to heal him. All of the grief and black wonder that he was never able to express, before or afterward, not to a navy psychiatrist, nor to a fellow drifter in some cheap hotel near Orlando, Florida, nor to his son, nor to any of those few who remained to love him when he finally returned to the world, all of it went into the queasy angles and stark compositions, the cross-hatchings and vast swaths of shadow, the distended and fractured and finely minced panels of his monstrous comic book.

At some point, he had begun to tell himself that his plan was not merely twofold but two-step—that when he was finished with The Golem, then he would be ready to see Rosa again. He had left her— escaped from her—in grief and rage and a spasm of irrational blame. It would be best, he told himself—wouldn't it?—for him to return to her purged of all that. But while there might have been at first some merit in this rationalization, by 1953, when Tommy Clay had stumbled upon him in the magic shop, Joe's ability to heal himself had long since been exhausted. He needed Rosa—her love, her body, but above all, her forgiveness—to complete the work that his pencils had begun. The only trouble was that, by then, as he had told Rosa, it was too late. He had waited too long. The sixty miles of Long Island that separated him from Rosa seemed more impassable than the jagged jaw of one thousand between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, than the three blocks of London that lay between Wakefield and his loving wife.

"Is there even a script?" Sammy said, turning over another page. "Is it, what, is it like a silent movie?"

There were no balloons in any of the panels, no words at all except for those that appeared as part of the artwork itself—signs on buildings and roads, labels on bottles, addresses on love letters that formed part of the plot—and the two words THE GOLEM! which reappeared on the splash page at the start of each chapter, each time in a different guise, the eight letters and exclamation point transformed now into a row of houses, now into a stairway, into nine marionettes, nine spidery bloodstains, the long shadows of nine haunted and devastating women. Joe had intended eventually to paste in balloons and fill them with text, but he had never been able to bring himself to mar the panels in this way.

"There is a script. In German."

"That ought to go over big."

"It will not go over at all. It's not to sell." Something paradoxical had occurred in the five years he had worked on The Golem: the more of himself, of his heart and his sorrows, that he had poured into the strip—the more convincingly he demonstrated the power of the comic book as a vehicle of personal expression—the less willingness he felt to show it to other people, to expose what had become the secret record of his mourning, of his guilt and retribution. It made him nervous just to have Sammy paging through it. "Come on, Sam, hey? Maybe we'd better go."

But Sammy was not listening. He was flipping slowly through the pages of the first chapter, deciphering the action from the flow of wordless images across the page. Joe was aware of a strange warmth in his belly, behind his diaphragm, as he watched Sammy read his secret book.

"I—I guess I could try to tell you—" he began.

"It's fine, I'm getting it." Sammy reached into the pocket of his overcoat, without looking, and took out his wallet. He pulled out a few bills, ones and a five. "Tell you what," he said. "I think I'm gonna be here for a while." He looked up. "Could you eat?"

"You're going to read this now?"

"Sure."

"All of it?"

"Why not? I give over fifteen years of my life to climbing a two-mile pile of garbage, I can spare a few hours for three feet of genius."

Joe rubbed at the side of his nose, feeling the warmth of Sammy's flattery spread to his legs and fill his throat. "Okay," he said at last. "So you can read it. But maybe you can wait till we get home?"

"I don't want to wait."

"I'm being evicted."

"Fuck them."

Joe nodded and took the money from Sammy. It had been a long time, a very long time, since he had allowed his cousin to boss him around in this way. He found that, as in the past, he rather liked it.

"And, Joe," Sammy said, without looking up from the pile of pages. Joe waited. "Rosa and I were talking. And she, uh, we think it's okay, if you want to ... that is, we think that Tommy ought to know that you're his father."

"I see. Yes, I suppose you're ... I will talk to him."

"We could all do it. Maybe we could sit him down. You. His mother. Me."

"Sammy," Joe said. "I don't know if this is the right thing to say, or what the right way to say it is. But—thank you."

"For what?"

"I know what you did. I know how it cost you something. I don't deserve to have a friend like you."

"Well, I wish I could say that I did it for you, Joe, because I'm such a good friend. But the truth is that, at that moment, I was as scared as Rosa. I married her because I didn't want to, well, to be a fairy. Which, actually, I guess I am. Maybe you never knew."

"Sort of a little bit, maybe I knew."

"It's that simple."

Joe shook his head. "That could be or is why you married her," he said. "But that doesn't explain how come you stayed. You are Tommy's father, Sammy. As much or really, I think, a lot more than I am."

"I did the easy thing," Sammy said. "Try it, you'll see." He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of golems through the ages. "So," he said, "they make a goat."

"Uh, yes," Joe said. "Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya."

"A goat golem."

"Out of earth."

"And then ..." Sammy's finger traced the course of the episode down and across the page. "After they go to all this trouble. It looks like it's kind of dangerous, making a golem."

"It is."

"After all that, they just... they eat it?"

Joe shrugged. "They were hungry," he said.

Sammy said that he knew how they felt, and even though he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sammy and Rosa, kneeling together beside a flickering crucible, working to fashion something that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand.

He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Empire State Pharmacy, on his usual stool, though for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes. He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did. He sat back and cracked his knuckles. He saw the counterman giving him a look. Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, moved two stools down the line, so that he was sitting right beside the window that looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see him.

"Make that a cheeseburger," he said.

While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of meat on the grill, Joe looked out the window and mulled over the things that Sammy had just revealed. He had never given much consideration to the feelings that had, for a few months during the fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together. To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands. The suddenness with which Sammy had swooped in, following Joe's enlistment, to marry Rosa—as if all that time he had been waiting, racked by a sexual impatience at once barely suppressed and perfectly conventional, to get Joe out of the way—had seemed to Joe to mark decisively the end of Sammy's brief experiment in bohemian rebellion. Sammy and Rosa had a child, moved to the suburbs, buckled down. For years they had lived, vividly, in Joe's imagination, as loving husband and wife, Sammy's arm around her shoulders, her arm encircling his waist, framed in an arching trellis of big, red American roses. It was only now, watching the traffic stalled on Thirty-third Street, smoking his way through a cheeseburger and glass of ginger ale, that he grasped the whole truth. Not only had Sammy never loved Rosa; he was not capable of loving her, except with the half-mocking, companionable affection he always had felt for her, a modest structure, never intended for extended habitation, long since buried under heavy brambles of indebtedness and choked in the ivy of frustration and blame. It was only now that Joe understood the sacrifice Sammy had made, not just for Joe's or for Rosa's or for Tommy's sake, but for his own: not a merely gallant gesture but a deliberate and conscious act of self-immurement. Joe was appalled.

He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with the raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems— from Rabbi Loew's to Victor von Frankenstein's—lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these—Faustian hubris, least of all—were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something—one poor, dumb, powerful thing—exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while only by this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for one instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the mysterious spirit world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited "escapism" among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.

"You need something else?" said the counterman, as Joe wiped his mouth and then threw his napkin to his plate.

"Yes, a fried-egg sandwich," Joe said. "With extra mayonnaise."

An hour after he had left, carrying a brown paper bag that contained the fried-egg sandwich and a package of Pall Malls, because he knew that by now Sammy would be out of cigarettes, Joe returned for the last time to Suite 7203. Sammy had taken off his jacket and his shoes. His necktie lay coiled around him on the floor.

"We have to do it," he said.

"Have to do what?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. I think I'm almost done. Am I almost done?"

Joe bent forward to see how far Sammy had gotten. The Golem appeared to have reached the twisting and jerry-built stairway, all splintered wood and protruding nails—it was almost, deliberately, like something out of Segar or Fontaine Fox—that would lead him to the tumbledown gates of Heaven itself.

"You're almost done."

"It goes faster when there aren't words."

Sammy took the bag from Joe, unrolled it, and peered inside. He took out the foil-wrapped sandwich, and then the pack of cigarettes.

"I worship at your feet," he said, tapping the pack with a finger. He ripped it open and drew one out with his lips.

Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down. Sammy lit up the cigarette and flipped—a bit carelessly, to Joe's mind—through the last dozen or so pages. He set his cigarette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio. He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chewing while he smoked.

"So?"

"So," Sammy said. "You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here."

"I know it."

"What's the matter with you, did you have a relapse?"

"I eat a pork chop every day." Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine.

"Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel," Sammy read. "By Angelo S. Rappoport." He flipped through the pages, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticism, as if he thought he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt. "You're into all this now?"

Joe shrugged. "It's all lies," he said mildly. "I guess."

"I remember when you first got here. That first day we went into Anapol's office. Do you remember that?"

Joe said that naturally he remembered that day.

"I handed you a Superman comic book and told you to come up with a superhero for us and you drew the Golem. And I thought you were an idiot."

"And I was."

"And you were. But that was 1939. In 1954, I don't think the Golem makes you such an idiot anymore. Let me ask you something." He looked around for a napkin, then picked up his necktie and wiped his shining lips. "Have you seen what Bill Gaines is doing over there at E.C.?"

"Yes, of course."

"They are not doing kid stuff over there. They have the top artists. They have Crandall. I know you always liked him."

"Crandall is the top, no doubt."

"And the stuff they are doing, grown-ups are reading it. Adults. It's dark. It's also mean, I think, but look around you, this is a mean age we're living in. Have you seen the Heap?"

"I love the Heap."

"The Heap, I mean, come on, that's a comic book character? He's basically, what, a sentient pile of mud and weeds and, I don't know, sediment. With that tiny little beak. He breaks things. But he's supposed to be a hero."

"I see what you're saying."

"This is what I'm saying. It's 1954. You got a pile of dirt walking around, the kids think that's admirable. Imagine what they'll think of the Golem."

"You want to publish this."

"Maybe not quite like it is here."

"Ah."

"It is awfully Jewish."

"True."

"Who knew you knew all that stuff? Kabbalah, is that what it's called? All those angels and ... and, is that what they are, angels?"

"Mostly."

"This is what I'm thinking. There's something to all this. Not just the Golem character. Your angels—do they have names?"

"There's Metatron. Uriel. Michael. Raphael. Samael. He's the bad one."

"With the tusks?"

Joe nodded.

"I like that one. You know, your angels look a little like superheroes."

"Well, it's a comic book."

"This is what I'm thinking."

"Jewish superheroes?"

"What, they're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Rent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."

Joe pointed to the stack of bulging portfolios on the ground between them. "But half the characters in there are rabbis, Sammy."

"All right, so we tone it down."

"You want us to work together again?"

"Well... actually ... I don't know, I'm just talking off the top of my head. This is just so good. It makes me want to ... make something again. Something I can be just a little bit proud of."

"You can be proud, Sammy. You have done great work. I have always been telling you this all along."

"What do you mean, all along, you've been gone since Pearl Harbor."

"In my mind."

"No wonder I didn't get the message."

Then, startling both of them, there was a flat, tentative knock. Someone was rapping on the frame of the open door to the corridor.

"Anyone here?" said an oboe voice, tentative and oddly familiar to Joe. "Hello?"

"Holy Amazing Midget Radio," Sammy said. "Look who it is."

"I heard I might find you boys up here," said Sheldon Anapol. He came into the room and shook hands with Sammy, then shambled over and stood in front of Joe. He had lost almost all of his hair, though none of his bulk, and his jaw, more mightily jowled than ever, was set in a defiant scowl. But his eyes, it seemed to Joe, were shining, full of tenderness and regret, as if he were seeing not Joe but the twelve years that had passed since their last encounter. "Mr. Kavalier."

"Mr. Anapol."

They shook hands, and then Joe felt himself being enveloped in the big man's fierce and sour embrace.

"You crazy son of a bitch," he said after he let Joe loose.

"Yes," Joe said.

"You look good, how are you?"

"I'm not bad."

"What was all that narrishkeit the other day, eh? You made me look very bad. I should be furious with you." He turned to Sammy. "I should be furious with him, don't you think?"

Sammy cleared his throat. "No comment," he said.

"How are you?" Joe asked him. "How is business?"

"A pointed question, as ever, from the mouths of you two. What can I tell you. Business is not good. In fact, it's very, very bad. As if television was not problem enough. Now we have hordes of Baptist lunatics down in Alabama, or some goddamned place, making big piles of comic books and setting them on fire because they are an offense to Jesus or the U.S. flag. Setting them on fire! Can you believe it? What did we fight the war for, if when it's over they're going to be burning books in the streets of Alabama? Then this Dr. Fredric Stick-Up-His-Ass Wertham, with that book of his. Now we have the Senate committee coming to town ... you heard about that?"

"I heard."

"They served me," Sammy said.

"You got subpoenaed?" Anapol stuck out his lip. "I didn't get subpoenaed."

"An oversight," Joe suggested.

"Why would they subpoena you, you're just an editor at that fifth-rate house, pardon me for saying so?"

"I don't know," Sammy admitted.

"Who knows, maybe they've got something on you." He took out his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his forehead. "Jesus, what lunacy. I never should have let you two talk me out of the novelty business. Nobody ever made a big pile of whoopee cushions and lit them on fire, let me tell you." He went over to the lone chair. "Mind if I sit down?" He sat and let out a long sigh. It seemed to begin rather perfunctorily, for show, but by the end it carried a startling cargo of unhappiness. "Let me tell you something else," he said. "I'm afraid I didn't come up here just because I wanted to say hello to Kavalier. I thought I ought to—I thought you might want to know."

"Know what?" Sammy said.

"You remember we had that lawsuit?" Anapol said.

The next day—the twenty-first of April, 1954—the Court of Appeals of the State of New York would finally hand down a ruling in the matter of National Periodical Publications, Inc. v. Empire Comics, Inc. The suit had, in that time, made its way in and out of the courts, with settlements proposed and rejected, weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages. National's case, in the business, was generally felt to be weak. Though both Superman and the Escapist shared skintight costumes, immense strength, and the odd impulse to conceal their true natures in the guise of far weaker and more fallible beings, the same qualities and features were shared by a host of other characters who had appeared in the comic books since 1958; or had been shared, at any rate, until those characters, one by one or in wholesale lots, had met their demise in the great superhero burn-off that followed the Second World War. Though it was true that National had also pursued Fawcett's Captain Marvel and Victor Fox's Wonder Man through the courts, a raft of other strong men who favored performing their feats, including flying, while wearing some form of undergarment—Amazing Man, Master Man, the Blue Beetle, the Black Condor, the Sub-Mariner—had been allowed to go about their business unmolested, without any apparent loss of income to National. Many would argue, in fact, that greater inroads into the hegemony of Superman in the marketplace had been made by his successors and imitators at National itself—Hourman, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Starman, the Green Lantern—many of whom were but distortions or pale reflections of the original. What was more, as Sammy had always argued, the character of Superman itself represented the amalgamation of "a bunch of ideas those guys stole from somebody else," in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Dann was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator; from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan, noble protector of a world of inferior beings; and from Lee Falk's newspaper comic strip The Phantom, whose eponymous hero had pioneered the fashion for colorful union suits among implacable foes of crime. In so many of his particulars, the Master of Elusion—a human showman, vulnerable, dependent on his team of assistants— bore very little resemblance to the Son of Krypton. Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of the term "superhero" had even been arrived at.[18][18] In the end, in its wisdom, the full panel of the Court of Appeals, overturning the ruling of the state Supreme Court, would side against the prevailing opinion in the comics trade and find in favor of the plaintiffs, sealing the Escapist's doom.

Like the news of the Treaty of Ghent to General Lambert at Biloxi, however, word of the court's ruling, when it came, already would have been overtaken by events.

"Today," Anapol said, "I killed the Escapist."

"What?"

"I killed him. Or let's say he's retired. I called Louis Nizer, I told him, Nizer, you win. As of today, the Escapist is officially retired. I give up. I'm settling. I'm signing his death warrant."

"Why?" Joe said.

"I've been losing money on the Escapist titles for a few years now. There was still some value in the property, you know, from various licensing arrangements, so I had to keep publishing him, just to keep the trademark viable. But his circulation figures have been in a nosedive for quite some time. Superheroes are dead, boys. Forget about it. None of our big hitters—Scofflaw, Jaws of Horror, Hearts and Flowers, Bobby Sox—none of them are superhero books."

Joe had gathered as much from Sammy. The age of the costumed superhero had long passed. The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, the Snowman and the Sandman and Hydroman, Captain Courageous, Captain Flag, Captain Freedom, Captain Midnight, Captain Venture and Major Victory, the Flame and the Flash and the Ray, the Monitor, the Guardian, the Shield and the Defender, the Green Lantern, the Red Bee, the Crimson Avenger, the Black Hat and the White Streak, Cat-Man and the Kitten, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, the Star-Spangled Rid and Stripesy, Dr. Mid-Nite, Mr. Terrific, Mr. Machine Gun, Mr. Scarlet and Miss Victory, Doll Man, the Atom and Minimidget, all had fallen beneath the whirling thresher blades of changing tastes, an aging readership, the coming of television, a glutted marketplace, and the unbeatable foe that had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the great heroes of the forties, only the stalwarts at National—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and a few of their cohorts—soldiered on with any regularity or commercial clout, and even they had been forced to suffer the indignity of seeing their wartime sales cut in half or more, of receiving second billing in titles where formerly they headlined, or of having forced upon them by increasingly desperate writers various attention-getting novelties and gimmicks, from fifteen different shades and flavors of Kryptonite to Bat-Hounds, Bat-Monkeys, and a magical-powered little elf-eared nudnick known as the Bat-Mite.

"He's dead," Sammy said wonderingly. "I can't believe it."

"Believe it," Anapol said. "This whole industry is dead after these hearings. You heard it here first, boys." He stood up. "That's why I'm getting out."

"Getting out? You mean you're selling Empire?"

Anapol nodded. "After I called Louis Nizer, I called my lawyer and told him to start working on the papers now. I want to get some sucker in there before the roof falls in." He looked around at the stacks of crates. "Look at this place," he said. "You always were a slob, Kavalier."

"True," Joe said.

Anapol started to walk out, then turned back. "You remember that day?" he said. "You two came in with that picture of the Golem and told me you were going to make me a million bucks."

"And we did," Sammy said. "A lot more than a million."

Anapol nodded. "Good night, boys," he said. "Good luck."

When he had gone, Sammy said, "I wish I had a million dollars." He said it tenderly, watching something lovely and invisible before him.

"Why?" Joe said.

"I'd buy Empire."

"You would? But I thought you hate comic books. You are embarrassed by them. If you had a million dollars, you could do anything else you wanted."

"Yeah," Sammy said. "You're right. What am I saying? Only you got me all stirred up with this Golem thing of yours. You always did have a way of confusing my priorities like that."

"Did I? Do I?"

"You always used to make it seem okay to believe in all this baloney."

"I think it was okay," Joe said. "I don't think maybe neither of us should have stopped."

"You were frustrated," Sammy said. "You wanted to get your hands on some real Germans."

Joe didn't say anything for so long that he could feel his silence beginning to speak to Sammy.

"Huh," he said finally.

"You killed Germans?"

"One," Joe said. "It was an accident."

"Did you—did it make you feel—"

"It made me feel like the worst man in the world."

"Hmm," Sammy said. He had gone back over to the final chapter of The Golem and stood staring down at a panel in which the clapper in the porter's bell on the doorpost of Heaven's gate was revealed to be a grinning human skull.

"Funny about the Escapist," Joe said, feeling that he wanted to get a hug from Sammy but checked somehow by the thought that it was something he had never done before. "I mean, not funny, but."

"Isn't it, though."

"Do you feel sad?"

"A little." Sammy looked up from the last page of The Golem and pursed his lips. He seemed to be shining a light on some dark corner of his feelings, to see if there was anything in it. "Not as much as I would have thought. It's been such a, you know. A long time." He shrugged. "What about you?"

"Like you." He took a step toward Sammy. "It was a long time."

He laid an arm, awkwardly, around Sammy's shoulders, and Sammy hung his head, and they rocked back and forth a little, remembering aloud that morning in 1939 when they had borne the Escapist and his company of fellow adventurers into Sheldon Anapol's office in the Kramler Building, Sammy whistling "Frenesi," Joe filled with the rapture and rage of the imaginary punch he had just landed on the jaw of Adolf Hitler.

"That was a good day," Joe said.

"One of the best," said Sammy.

"How much money do you have?"

"Not a million, that's for sure." Sammy stepped out from under Joe's arm. His eyes narrowed, and he looked suddenly shrewd and Anapolian. "Why? How much do you have, Joe?"

"It isn't quite a million," Joe said.

"It isn't quite—you mean to say that you—oh. That money."

Every week for two years, starting in 1939, Joe had socked money into the fund that he intended for the support of his family when they reached America. He anticipated that their health might have suffered, and that it might be difficult for them to get work. Most of all, he wanted to buy them a house, a detached house on its own patch of grass somewhere in the Bronx or New Jersey. He wanted them never to have to share a roof with anyone again. By the end of 1941, he was putting in more than a thousand dollars at a time. Since then—apart from the ten thousand dollars he had spent to doom fifteen children to lie forever among the sediments of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—he had barely touched it; in fact, the account had been swelled, even in his absence, by royalties from the Escapist radio program, which had aired well into 1944, and by the two largish lump payments he had received as his share of the Parnassus serial deal.

"Yes," he said. "I still have it."

"It's just."

"Sitting there," Joe said. "In the East Side Stage Crafts Credit Union. Since ... well, since the Ark of Miriam sank. On December 6, 1941."

"Twelve years and four months."

"Sitting there."

"That's a long time, too," Sammy said.

Joe agreed with this.

"I guess there really isn't any reason to leave it there," he said. The thought of working with Sammy again was very appealing. He had just spent five years drawing a comic book; all day, every day, taking a break every now and then, just long enough to read a comic book or two. He considered himself, at this point, to be the greatest comic book artist in the history of the world. He could dilate a crucial episode in the life of a character over ten pages, slicing his panels ever thinner until they stopped time completely and yet tumbled past with the irreversible momentum of life itself. Or he could spread a single instant across two pages in a single giant panel crammed with dancers, laboratory equipment, horses, trees and shadows, soldiers, drunken revelers at a wedding. When the mood called for it, he could do panels that were more than half shadow; pure black; and yet have everything visible and clear, the action unmistakable, the characters' expressions plain. With his un-English ear, he had made a study of, and understood, as the great comic artists always have, the power of written sound-effect words—of invented words like snik and plish and doit—appropriately lettered, for lending vividness to a jackknife, a rain puddle, a half-crown against the bottom of a blind man's empty tin cup. And yet he had run out of things to draw. His Golem was finished, or nearly so, and for the first time in years he found himself—as on every level of his life and emotions— wondering what he was going to do next.

"You'd think I would," he began. "You would think I'd be able to."

More than anything else, he wanted to be able to do something for Sammy. It shocked him to see just how beaten, how unhappy Sam had become. What a feat it would be, to reach into the dark sleeve of his past and pull out something that completely altered Sammy's condition; something that saved him, freed him, returned him to life. With a stroke of the pen, he would be able to hand Sammy, according to the ancient mysteries of the League, a golden key, to pass along the gift of liberation that he had received and that had, until now, gone unpaid.

"I know that I should," Joe continued. His voice thickened as he spoke, and his cheeks burned. He was crying; he had no idea why. "Oh, I should just get rid of it all."

"No, Joe." Now it was Sammy's turn to put his arm around Joe. "I understand you don't want to touch that money. I mean, I think I understand. I get that it... well, that it represents something to you that you don't want to ever forget."

"I forget every day," Joe said. He tried to smile. "You know? Days go by, and I don't remember not to forget."

"You just keep your money," Sammy said gently. "I don't need to own Empire Comics. That's the last thing I need."

"I... I couldn't. Sammy, I wish that I could, but I couldn't."

"I get it, Joe," Sammy said. "You just hold on to your money."

15

THE DAY AFTER THE ESCAPIST, Master of Elusion, whom no chains could hold nor walls imprison, was ruled out of existence by the New York State Court of Appeals, a white delivery van of modest dimensions pulled up in front of 127 Lavoisier Drive. On its panels, blue script like the writing on a beer bottle said BACHELOR BUTTON DRAYAGE INC. NEW YORK , arched over a painted nosegay of petite blue flowers. It was getting on toward five o'clock of a dull April afternoon, and though there was still plenty of daylight, the van's lights were turned on, as if for a funeral procession. It had been raining in fits all day, and with the approach of dusk, the heavy sky itself seemed to be settling, like a blanket, over Bloomtown, in gray folds and plaits among the houses. The slender trunks of the young maples, sycamores, and pin oaks on the neighbors' lawns looked white, almost phosphorescent, against the darker gray stuff of the afternoon.

The driver cut his engine, switched off the lights, and climbed down from the cab. He cranked the heavy latch at the back of the van, slid the bar to one side, and threw open the doors with a steely creak of hinges. He was an improbably diminutive man for his trade, thickset and bowlegged, in a bright blue coverall. As Rosa watched him through the front windows of the house, she saw him stare in at his payload with what appeared to be a puzzled expression. She supposed, given Sammy's description, that the hundred and two boxes of comic books and other junk that Joe had accumulated must make a strong impression even on a veteran mover. But perhaps the guy was only trying to decide how in the hell he was going to get all those boxes into the house by himself.

"What's he doing?" Tommy said. He stood beside her at the living-room window. He had just eaten three bowls of rice pudding, and he had a milky baby smell.

"Probably wondering how we're ever going to fit all of that crap into this shoe box," Rosa said. "I can't believe Joe contrived not to be here for this."

"You said 'crap.' "

"Sorry."

"Can I say 'crap'?"

"No." Rosa was wearing a sauce-spattered apron, and held a wooden spoon bloodied in the same red sauce. "I can't believe it all fits inside that one little truck."

"Ma, when is Joe coming back?"

"I'm sure he'll be back any minute." This was probably the fourth time she had said this since Tommy had come home from school. "I'm making chile con carne and rice pudding. He won't want to miss that."

"He really likes your cooking."

"He always did."

"He said if he never sees another pork chop again, it will be too soon."

"I would never cook a pork chop."

"Bacon is pork, and we eat bacon."

"Bacon is not actually pork. There are words in the Talmud to that effect."

They went out onto the front step.

"Kavalier?" the man called, trying to rhyme the name with its French cognate.

"As in Maurice," Rosa said.

"Got a package."

"That's kind of an understatement, isn't it?"

The man didn't reply. He climbed up inside his truck and disappeared for a while. First a wooden ramp emerged from the back, like a tongue, reaching toward the neighbors' Buick, then lolling on the ground. After that, there was a lot of banging and clamor, as though the man were in there rolling around a keg of beer. Presently he emerged, wrestling a hand truck down the ramp, under the weight of a large oblong wooden box.

"What is that?" Rosa said.

"I never saw that at Joe's," Tommy said. "Wow, it must be part of his equipment! It looks like a—oh my gosh—it's a packing crate escape! Oh, my gosh. Do you think he's going to teach me how to do it?"

I don't even know if he's ever coming back. "I don't know what he's going to do, honey," she said.

When Joe and Sammy had returned from the city last night with news of the Escapist's passing, they both seemed pensive, and said little before they each went to bed. Sammy seemed diffident, even apologetic, around Joe, scrambling up some eggs for him, asking him were they too runny, were they too dry, offering to fry some potatoes. Joe was monosyllabic, almost curt, Rosa would have said; he went to lie down on the couch without having exchanged more than a few dozen words with either Rosa or Sam. She saw that something had passed between the two men, but since neither of them said anything about it, she assumed it must have simply concerned the demise of their brainchild; perhaps they had engaged in recriminations over lost opportunities.

The news had certainly come as a shock to Rosa. Though she had not been a regular reader since the days of Kavalier & Clay—Sammy wouldn't have Empire books in the house—she still checked in with Radio and Escapist Adventures from time to time, killing a half hour at a Grand Central newsstand, or while waiting for a prescription at Spiegelman's. The character had long since slipped into cultural inconsequence, but the titles in which he starred had continued, as far as she knew, to sell. She'd assumed, more or less unconsciously, that the heroic puss of the Escapist would always be there, on lunch boxes, beach towels, on cereal boxes and belt buckles and the faces of alarm clocks, even on the Mutual Television Network,[19][19] taunting her with the wealth and the unimaginable contentment that, though she knew better, she could never help feeling would have been Sammy's had he been able to reap the fruits of the one irrefutable moment of inspiration vouchsafed him in his scattershot career. Rosa had stayed up very late trying to work, worrying about them both, and then slept in even later than usual. By the time she had woken up, both Joe and the Studebaker were gone. All his clothes were in his valise, and there was no note. Sammy seemed to feel these were good signs.

"He would leave a note," he said when she phoned him at the office. "If he were. Going to leave, I mean."

"There wasn't any note the last time," Rosa said.

"I really don't think he would steal our car."

Now here were all his things, and Joe was not. It was as if he had pulled a substitution trick on them, the old switcheroo.

"I guess we'll have to just cram it all into the garage," she said.

The stout little mover wheeled the crate up the walk to the front door, puffing and grimacing and nearly running off into the pansies. When he reached Rosa and Tommy, he tipped the hand truck forward onto its bracket. The crate tottered and seemed to consider pitching over before it settled, with a shiver, on its end.

"Weighs a ton," he said, flexing his fingers as if they were sore. "What's he got in there, bricks?"

"It's probably iron chains," Tommy explained in an authoritative tone. "And, like, padlocks and junk."

The man nodded. "A box of iron chains," he said. "Figures. Pleased to meetcha." He wiped his right hand down the front of his coverall and offered it to Rosa. "Al Button."