This information made no impression on the children that Joe could see, and in spite of his efforts to calm himself, the sense of hesitation, of doubt, that he had experienced on the steps of the school began rapidly to intensify into outright dread. They were going to flop.
“Are you ready?” he asked Tommy, working his face into a tight smile. Tommy nodded.
Joe reached for the deck of cards. Another child, one of the Hazzard twins, raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Why does the Escapist pretend to be that crippled guy?”
Joe looked at him. “He doesn’t pretend,” he said. “He really is crippled.”
“But why doesn’t he just hold on to that key all the time, then? Why does he want to be crippled?”
“I guess because if he was strong and powerful all the time, he would forget how it feels to be weak and helpless.”
The value in this moral discipline appeared to be lost on them.
“I don’t know,” Joe said, dismissing the question with a wave of his hand like a cloud of smoke. “I just drew the pictures!”
The children laughed. It was the perfect note to begin on. Calmly, slowly, he worked his way through the tricks he had prepared, calling on Tommy to help him when a confederate was required, and on one of the other children when all he needed was a pigeon. He guessed their chosen cards and vanished their milk money and seemed truly to astonish them when the sodden wad of tissue paper bloomed into a crisp neat Japanese fan.
“Thank you,” Joe said, taking a bow. “Thank you very much.”
Mr. Landauer propelled himself from the window ledge and came toward them, notebook tucked under his arm, applauding. The children joined in, but their response, given the degree to which they had appeared to enjoy the show, seemed halfhearted. One of the Hazzard twins did not applaud at all.
“What is it?” Mr. Landauer said, perceiving that something was amiss.
There was no reply at first. Then one of the Hazzard twins raised his hand. “What about the safe?” he said.
Mr. Landauer looked first at Joe, then at Tommy, then back at Joe. “Some of the children have been …”
Tommy started to look down at his shoes, but this time he stopped himself and looked at Joe. His cheeks were red, and Joe saw that he might begin to cry at any moment, and yet the expression in his eyes seemed to Joe to be one of neither anger nor embarrassment but rather of challenge. He had made, once again, extravagant claims on Joe’s behalf, claims that were in themselves a kind of imprisoning cask of steel and rivets from which it was now incumbent on Joe, somehow or other, to free himself. You get out of anything, the boy’s look said. Get me out of this.
“The safe,” Joe began, rubbing at his chin. “Unfortunately, the, uh, the school commission—”
“The school board,” Mr. Landauer put in.
“Yes, the school board has regulations that, unfortunately, prevent me from being able to perform such a dangerous escape at this time. I am very sorry for that.”
The children expressed their profound disappointment with the school board. But one of the Hazzard boys said, “Right.” He turned to his brother. “I told you it was just a lot of stuff.” He looked at Tommy. “Pudge. You big liar.”
“Frank,” Mr. Landauer said in an admonitory tone.
“But—” Joe said. “I am willing—” He started for the back of the room, the children turning their heads to follow his progress as he headed toward the door at the back, between Duke Ellington and Albert Einstein. “Mr. Landauer, do you happen to have the key to this closet back here?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Kavalier. I do.”
Joe tried the knob and opened the utility closet. Like the rest of Mr. Landauer’s classroom, it was orderly. There were shelves on either side of it, neatly stacked with supplies, and a wheeled cart in the center, bearing some kind of complicated projector. The lock looked like a simple enough affair, though Joe noted that there was no keyway on the inside knob. Somehow he would have to move aside the latch bolt. He grabbed a roll of packing tape from one of the shelves, and a ball of twine, and two skeins of yarn.
“Who would like to tie me up?”
The children burst from their chairs and ran to the back of the room. With Mr. Landauer’s supervision, they tied and wrapped and wove a lumpy cocoon around Joe, who stood with his arms at his sides, maintaining an expression of professional amusement. Tommy, he noticed, looked delighted.
“Now,” Joe said. “You can see how I am tied. And please look to notice that on the inside of the doorknob, there is no way or place to put a key. After I step in, my assistant will close the door. You will place a chair or other object against it.” He paused; the chair was purely for effect, of course. “In five minutes I will be free.”
They pushed him into the closet and closed the door. By dint of wriggling and squirming and using the edge of a metal shelf bracket to saw through the twine, Joe made short work of the bindings. Then he realized that he had left his wallet in the pocket of his jacket, out in the classroom, and hence the laminated card—his green card—that he had planned to slip between the faceplate and the strike plate of the lock, depressing the latch bolt. He began to feel around in the darkness for a piece of cardstock or other stiff, thin object he could craft into the proper size and shape. He picked up a series of boxes and rattled them, listening: pipe cleaners; celluloid beads; bottles of mucilage; wooden sticks. Ah. He lifted the lid of this box and found that it was filled, according to his fingers, with tongue depressors; nothing could have been more appropriate for pushing aside the poked-out metal tongue of the lock. He smiled, took a depressor, and stuck it into the crack alongside the door, feeling for the spot. He found the latch bolt and pushed. It gave a millimeter, then refused to move. He renewed his grip on the tongue depressor and pushed again: a millimeter. The lock was jammed. He pushed again, and the stick broke off in the crack. Joe pressed a shoulder against the door and gave a shove, but it held fast. He grabbed the knob and twisted as hard as he could. He felt for the hinges, but the door opened outward. Joe fell backward and leaned against the rear wall of the closet, recalling the defiant look in the boy’s eyes.
Three and half minutes later, as the vice principal of William Floyd, Mr. Ebell, was walking down the second-floor corridor, he heard a burst of cheering from Mr. Landauer’s classroom. When he paused to peer in through the oblong window in the classroom door, he saw the children gathered around the closet at the back of the room. Some of them actually appeared to be inside the closet, searching for something. Mr. Ebell opened the door and poked in his head. “What’s going on here?” he said.
Mr. Landauer grinned. “We seem to have lost Tommy’s cousin,” he said.
“Well,” Mr. Ebell said. “Settle down, now.”
The children dragged themselves somewhat histrionically back to their desks. Mr. Landauer closed the closet door.
At the end of the day, after Tommy and all the other children had left the classroom, Mr. Landauer went back to the supply closet and pulled open the door.
“Mr. Kavalier?” he called. “They’re gone.”
There was a scraping sound overhead, and as Felix Landauer looked up, he saw a foot emerge from the ceiling of the closet. There, in the far corner, above the highest shelf and invisible to anyone, he imagined, shorter than five and a half feet or so, was a crude, jagged hatch cut—torn in places—from the particleboard ceiling, out of which Joe Kavalier now emerged. He was dusty and cobwebbed, and a bloody scratch had congealed on his cheek. Mr. Landauer helped him down, then took him to the boys’ bathroom. He wet paper towels and, while Joe Kavalier washed his face and hands, brushed away the dust and spider silk from the magician’s white suit as well as he could.
“Thank you,” said Joe Kavalier. “They were pleased?”
“They were,” Mr. Landauer said. “Particularly Tommy.”
“I’m glad of that, then,” Joe said. “It’s not too fun, I can tell you, being in a closet all da
y.”
Mr. Landauer stood up, brushing the dust from his hands, his eyebrows raised and his careful mouth pursed, and said that he could well imagine. “I have my car,” he said. “If we left now, we could probably beat him home.”
When Tommy came around the corner from Marconi Avenue, Joe was standing out in front of the house, holding the valise in one hand, looking dusty and travel-stained, as if he had just arrived from Czechoslovakia that morning. The boy carried his satchel of books slung across his shoulder, looking bowed under the weight. When he saw Joe, he stopped and raised a hand. He stood up straight and hitched his satchel a little higher. “Hey,” he said.
“Hello,” said Joe.
They stood there on the sidewalk, about twenty feet apart, separated by some new shyness, the boy knowing only that the man whom he glancingly believed to be his father had delivered on the boy’s own wild promise, Joe knowing only how abjectly he had failed.
“Tell me how you did it, Joe.”
“You know that I can’t,” Joe said.
When they walked into the house, Rosa was stretched out on the sofa in the living room, reading a magazine, her head pillowed on the neat stack of Joe’s bedclothes.
“How did it go?” she asked them, reaching for Tommy’s hand.
“Great,” said the boy mildly, pulling it away.
“Well, tell me about it.”
For an instant Joe waited, at once confident and ashamed, for the excited account of his performance, of the thoroughness with which, Rosa would be led to believe, Joe had come through for their son.
Tommy shrugged. “It went great,” he said. It was then that Joe saw—and he did not so much realize as remember it—the inevitable outcome of his efforts that day: The boy was going to keep the whole thing to himself. “I have to use the bathroom.” He went down the hallway. They heard the door close, then the low, humorous whistle of his urine in the bowl.
“What happened?” Rosa said. “Did it go all right?”
Joe considered telling her that his calculated bid to impress her with his readiness to get on with their lives together had ended in his becoming lodged in the rafters of William Floyd Elementary School, cramped, half-suffocated, mouth filled with dust, and needing desperately himself to use the bathroom, for five and a half hours.
“It went great,” he said, clinging to old habits of secrecy and furtiveness.
Rosa threw the magazine at him.
“The two of you,” she said.
THE CROSSOVER
Dark Horse Books, 2007
ONE WEEKEND TOWARD THE END of his public life, as he and his ex-wife plied their yearly course along the circuit of comic book conventions, bickering, bantering, holding each other up when the sidewalks were icy or the stairs steep, Sam Clay found himself in Cleveland, Ohio, as a guest of honor at the 1986 ErieCon. ErieCon was a midsize regional show held in the ballroom of a Euclid Avenue hotel that stood, until it was demolished, across the street from a grand old movie palace that soon after also succumbed to the wrecking ball, during one of the spasms of redevelopment that have tormented Cleveland’s slumber for the past forty years.
People who saw them making the con scene in those years were often touched by the steadfast way that Rosa Kavalier—born Rosa Luxemburg Saks in New York City in 1919 and known to the world, if at all, as Rose Saxon, a queen of the romance comics—kept hold of the elbow of one of her ex-husband’s trademark loud blazers as they moved from curb to counter, from ballroom to elevator, from bar to dining room. They were, people said, devoted to each other. Undoubtedly this was the case. They had known each other for over forty-five years, and though no one ever quite untangled the complicated narrative of their various creative and romantic partnerships, mutual devotion was certainly part of the story. But the truth of the tight grip Rosa kept on Sam was that, after a series of unsuccessful operations to repair his damaged retinas, the man could see barely a foot in front of his face.
“She’s my Seeing Eye dog,” he would say, and then he would wait, wearing a shortsighted grin, as if daring his ex-wife to find no humor in his witticism, a challenge she was always ready to accept.
But to the people who knew Sam—old-timers, friends and enemies from the Golden and Silver ages, the beaming young (or formerly young) protégés who regularly radiated from the formless warmth of the Kavalier-Clay ménage—it was obvious how humiliating he found his poor vision, his lousy teeth, the hobbled, foot-dragging gait that had resulted from the surprise return, when he hit his sixties, of the polio that crippled him as a boy. Sam Clay was a professionally (if not always convincingly) fierce man whose mighty shoulders and Popeye forearms attested to a lifelong regimen of push-ups, dumbbells, and the punching of speed bags. You could see that he hated every moment he had to spend “hanging around Rosa,” in his own formulation, “like a persistent fart.”
On this particular Saturday afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1986, therefore, when it came time for Sam to transfer custody from his plumbing system to the hotel’s of the Dr Pepper-and-orange juice cocktail (mixed by a secret formula known to and palatable only by him) that he had been swilling from a thermos all morning, Sam got up from the “Kavalier & Clay” table in Artist’s Alley and set forth alone to find the men’s room, which, according to the guy at the next table, lay just a few steps outside and to the left of the Cuyahoga Ballroom’s gilded doors. How hard could it be? Rosa was off somewhere having a confab with some skinny little thing named Diana from Comico, and Sam’s new assistant, Mark Morgenstern (later known for his work on the DC Vertigo revival of the old Pharaoh Comics title Earthman), was attending the Klaus Nordling tribute panel. And Sammy, Sam decided, could goddamn well find his own goddamn way to the toilet.
As it turned out, there was no bathroom just outside and to the left of the ballroom’s gilded doors; or perhaps the ballroom had more doors than Sam knew about, or featured less gilding than he had been led to expect, or maybe, he thought bitterly, he was just so addlepated and purblind that he no longer knew his left from his right. He spent ten minutes blundering around the elevator lobby, responding with cheerful irritation to greetings and good wishes from blurred faces and voices that sounded as though he ought to know them. But his attention was largely occupied with the effort it cost him not to appear to be lost, blind, and in desperate need of a pee, so that he might as well have been in a crowd of strangers. There was an unpleasant incident with a large potted fern, and a compromising entanglement with the legs of a display easel. Sam’s dignity—an attribute with which, until quite recently, he had never been unduly burdened—would not, it appeared, permit him to admit that he was in need of assistance.
At one point he found himself in an intimate metallic space whose acoustics suggested a washroom or stall, and he knew a horrible instant of hope and relief before realizing that he was in fact riding an elevator. He got off at some floor and walked in some direction, trailing his right hand against the dark red softness of the hallway’s flocked wallpaper because once, many years before, in an issue of Astounding, he had read that you could always count on finding your way in and out of any labyrinth as long as, from the moment you entered it, you kept one hand in continuous contact with one wall. This expedient may or may not have had something to do with the fact that, twenty-five minutes after setting out from Artist’s Alley full of piss and confidence, he succeeded, not without effort, in locking himself inside a broom closet.
Like most grave mistakes, his became apparent more or less upon commission. The bright burgundy flocked-velvet blur of the hallway went black. The door shut behind him with the decisive click of some instrument of execution snapping to. There was an acrid bubblegum stink of disinfectant and the damp-bedsheet smell of old mopheads. Sammy knew a moment of pure infantile dread. Then in the darkness he smiled.
“At least,” he pointed out to himself, unzipping his fly, “there’ll be a bucket.”
With a chiming like some liquid carillon, he relieved himself into the roll
ing mop bucket whose contours his shoetips and then fingertips had revealed to him. Bliss, fulfillment through evacuation. He zipped up and began, with fresh dread, to contemplate the impossible task that lay before him, which consisted of shouldering the now almost unendurable and infinitely imperiled burden of his dignity while pounding on the door of the broom closet and screaming for help until he was hoarse, all the while enjoying the piscine bouquet of his own urine. He opened his mouth, ready to scream. Then he closed his mouth, experiencing second thoughts about this course. When, after all, they finally discovered his corpse, or perhaps his skeleton, in this closet, huddled over a bucket of ancient pee, that would perhaps be embarrassing for some people; but not for him, because he would be dead. He slapped the door once, twice, with the flat of his hand. He leaned against a steel shelf stacked with rolls of toilet paper in their paper wrappers, and readied himself for the final indignity, and sighed.
There was a rattle—the doorknob—and then an insect scratching, wire feelers. And then a burst of light and air.
“I saw you go in,” said a boy. “Then I heard knocking.” A boy in a red baseball cap. An open mouth, maybe some kind of dirt around the mouth. Sammy leaned forward to get a better look. About ten years old, a standard-issue little American kid but with something sly in his eyes and an overall air of injury or grievance. He was wearing a red jersey with the word LIONS running in old-timey script across the front, and in his hand he held an open Swiss army knife. The grime on his lips a streak of chocolate, a chocolate crumb or two. A Hostess cupcake, maybe a Ding Dong.
“It smells kind of like pee in there,” the boy said.
“God, you’re right!” said Sam, waving his hand back and forth in front of his face. “This hotel really is a dump.” He stepped out of the closet and shut the door behind him.
“Hey, thanks, kid. Guess I—” But what was the point of lying? Would he ever see this kid again? Guess I just wandered into a closet. “Guess I had the wrong room. Thanks.” He and the boy shook hands, the boy’s boneless and reluctant in his. Sam gestured with his chin to the little red knife. “Pretty handy with that. What are you, the world’s youngest second-story man? Hotel dick know about you?”