“You didn’t show her boobs!” said Julie.
“Not for three dollars,” said Joe.
With grumbling and a great show of reluctance, Julie paid Joe off, then slid the envelope into the hip pocket of his overcoat, wedging it protectively into a copy of Planet Stories. When, fifty-three years later, he died, the drawing of Rosa Saks naked and asleep was found among his effects, in a Barracini’s candy box, with a souvenir yarmulke from his eldest son’s bar mitzvah and a Norman Thomas button, and was erroneously exhibited, in a retrospective at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, as the work of the young Julius Glovsky. As for Common Errors in Perspective Drawing, the overdue library book, recent inquiries have revealed that it was returned, under a citywide amnesty program, in 1971.
IN THE IMMEMORIAL STYLE of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time. They took their shoes off, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and loosened their neckties. They moved ashtrays around, swept stacks of magazines to the floor, put a record on, and generally acted as if they owned the place. They were in the room where the boy-genius artists kept their drawing tables and taborets, a room variously referred to by its occupants over the years as the Bullpen, the Pit, the Rathole, and Palooka Studios, the latter a name often applied to the entire apartment, to the building, occasionally to the neighborhood, and even, on grim, hungover, hacking mornings with a view out the bathroom window of a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash, to the whole damn stinking world. At some time in the last century, it had been an elegant lady’s bedroom. There were still curvy brass gas fixtures and egg-and-dart moldings, but most of the moss-green moiré paper had been ripped down for drawing stock, leaving the walls covered only by a vast brown web of crazed glue. But in truth, Sammy and Joe scarcely took note of their surroundings. It was just the clearing in which they had come to pitch the tent of their imaginations. Sammy lay down on a spavined purple davenport; Joe, on the floor, was aware for a moment that he was lying on a sour-smelling oval braided rug, in an apartment recently vacated by a girl who had impressed him, in the few instants of their acquaintance, as the most beautiful he had ever seen in his life, in a building whose face he had scaled so that he could begin to produce comic books for a company that sold farting pillows, in Manhattan, New York, where he had come by way of Lithuania, Siberia, and Japan. Then a toilet flushed elsewhere in the apartment, and Sammy peeled his socks off with a happy sigh, and Joe’s sense of the present strangeness of his life, of the yawning gap, the long, unretraceable path that separated him from his family, receded from his mind.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay—whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four-color dots of the lithographer—lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk. Carefully, with a certain rueful humor inspired in part by self-consciousness at his broken grammar, Joe told the story of his interrupted studies with the Ausbrecher Bernard Kornblum, and described the role his old teacher had played in his departure from Prague. He told Sammy merely that he had been smuggled out in a shipment of unspecified artifacts that Sammy pictured aloud as big Hebrew grimoires locked with golden clasps. Joe did not disabuse him of this picture. He was embarrassed now that, when asked for a lithe aerial Superman, he had drawn a stolid golem in a Phrygian cap, and felt that the less said from now on about golems, the better. Sammy was keen on the details of autoliberation, and full of questions. Was it true that you had to be double-jointed, that Houdini was a prodigy of reversible elbow and knee sockets? No, and no. Was it 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 unschooled 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 eight feet tall, to whom the massive hand belongs. He has the brow of an ape and the posture of a bear and the accent of a Viennese professor of medicine. He can rip open a steel drum like a can of tobacco, lift a train carriage by one corner, play the violin like Paganini, and calculate the velocity of asteroids and comets, one of which bears his name. His name is Alois Berg and the comet is called Berg’s comet, but to the theatergoing public and to his friends he is usually just Big Al. “Come, there is a problem with the water tank.”
Backstage, the instruments of torture and restraint stand in their proper places, looking both menacing and droll, ready for the stagehands to drag, wheel, or hoist them out onto the storied boards of the Palace. There is a regulation, asylum-issue, strap-strewn lunatic’s bed; a large, slender milk can of riveted iron; a medieval Catherine wheel; and an incongruous chrome suit rack, from which dangle on prosaic wire hangers a fantastic array of straitjackets, ropes, chains, and thick leather straps. And there is the water tank, a great oblong box of glass, dolphin-sized, standing on one end: a drowned telephone booth. The glass is inch-thick, tempered, and tamperproof. The seals are neat and watertight. The timbers that frame the glass are sturdy and reliable. The boy knows all this because he built the tank himself. He wears, we see now, a leather apron filled with tools. There is a pencil stuck behind his ear and a chalk string in his pocket. If there is a problem with the tank, he can fix it. He must fix it: curtain is in less than five minutes.
“What’s the matter with it?” The boy—really he is almost a man—makes his way toward the tank with aplomb, heedless of the crutch under his arm, untroubled by the left leg that has been lame since he was an infant.
“It seems to be inert, my boy. Immobilized.” Big Al goes to the tank and gives it a friendly shove. The thousand-pound box tips, and the water inside shivers and sloshes. He could move the tank onstage unaided, but there are union rules, and greater showmanship in the five big stagehands that the feat requires. “In words of one syllable, stuck.”
“Something’s caught in this wheel here.” The young man lowers himself down his crutch, hand under hand, lies on his back, and slides under a corner of the tank’s heavy base. There is a rubber-tired wheel, mounted on a steel caster, at each corner. At one corner, something has lodged itself between tire and caster. The young man slips a screwdriver from his tool belt and starts to poke around.
“Al,” comes his voice from under the tank. “What’s the matter with him today?”
“Nothing, Tom,” Big Al says. “He is merely tired. It’s the last night of the engagement. And he is no longer as youthful as he once was.”
They have been joined, silently, by a small, slender man in a turban. His face is ageless and brown, his eyes dark and sensitive. He has never joined any group, party, or discussion in any way other than silently. Stealth is in his nature. He is laconic and cautious and light on his feet. No one knows how old he is, or how many lives he lived before entering the employ of the Master of Escape. He can be a doctor, a pilot, a sailor, a chef. He is at home on every continent, conversant with the argot of policemen and thieves. There is no one better at bribing a prison guard before a jailbreak stunt to plant a key in a cell, or a reporter to inflate the number of minutes that the Master remained underwater during a bridge leap. He is called Omar, a name so patently corny that it, with the turban and the desert-brown skin, is widely believed by the public to be nothing more than atmosphere, a getup, part of the thrill-making shtick of Misterioso the Great. But if his origins and true name are doubtful, his dusky complexion is genuine. As for the turban, none outside the company know how vain he is about his receding hairline.
“Okay, then what’s the matter with you,” the young man persists. “You and Omar. You’ve been acting strange all day.”
Omar and Big Al exchange looks. The revelation of secrets is more than anathema to them; it goes against their nature and training. They would be incapable of telling the boy, even if they wanted to.
“Imagination,” Omar says finally, decisively.
“Too many pulp novels,” says Big Al.
“Tell me this, then.” The young man, Tom Mayflower, slides out from under the tank, clutching a black leather button lost from a coat front or a sleeve, embossed with a curious symbol, like three interlinked ovals. “What’s the Iron Chain?”
Big Al looks toward Omar again, but his comrade has already disappeared, as silently as he came. Though he knows that Omar has gone to warn the Master, still Big Al curses him for leaving him alone to answer or not answer this question. He takes the button, to whose eyelet a bit of thread still clings, and tucks it into the pocket of his giant waistcoat.
“Two minutes,” he says, suddenly as terse as their turbaned friend. “Have you fixed it?”
“It’s perfect,” Tom says, accepting the great antler hand that Big Al offers, scrambling to his unsteady feet. “Like ev
erything I do.”
Later, he will remember this flip reply and regret it with a flush of shame. For the tank is not perfect, not at all.
At five minutes past eight o’clock, Tom knocks. There is a star on the door, and under it, painted on a strip of card, the words “Mr. Misterioso.” Tom’s uncle, Max Mayflower, has never missed a curtain before. Indeed, his entire act is timed to the half second, tailored and endlessly readjusted to suit the abilities and, increasingly, the limitations of its star. His unheard-of tardiness has caused Big Al to fall silent, and Omar to utter a string of oaths in a barbarous tongue. But neither has the nerve to disturb the man they call Master. It is Miss Plum Blossom, the costumer, who has pushed Tom toward the door. Naturally, the ageless Chinese seamstress is widely believed to be secretly in love with Max Mayflower. Naturally, she is secretly in love with him. There are even rumors about these two and the somewhat misty parentage of Tom Mayflower, but though he loves Miss Blossom and his uncle dearly, Tom takes these rumors for the idle gossip they are. Miss Blossom would never dare disturb the Master in his dressing room before a show either, but she knows that Tom may penetrate certain of the man’s mysteries and humors in a way that no one else can. Behind him, she gives another gentle push at the small of his back.
“It’s Tom,” the young man says, getting no answer. And then takes the unprecedented liberty of opening the dressing-room door unbidden.