The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (37 page)

This is too much for the Under-Assistant Cataloguer of Decommissioned Volumes. She rushes into the echoing hall with a vague plan to frighten or at the very least distract the men from their evil work. Or perhaps she can lead them away by drawing their attention to herself. Taking advantage of the momentary confusion created by her appearance and her cry of "NOOOOOO!" she snatches up the sack with the sacred Book of Lo inside and runs out of the gallery. The thieves, having recovered their presence of mind, give chase now, guns drawn, curses streaming from their lips in mad torrents of printer's marks and random punctuation.

Miss Dark, terrified but not so that it prevents her from entertaining the ironic thought that for the first time in her life she knows what it feels like to have men chasing after her, heads for the safest place she knows: her neat, square hole underground. She cannot afford to wait for the elevator. Running headlong down the fire stairs she is struck by the odd feeling that the Book of Lo has come to pulsing life in her arms; but no, that's just the reverberation of her own pounding heart.

They catch her in the long corridor of Subbasement 3. She turns, a gun glints, then sprouts a bright white flower. But the shot, in that dark, cramped corridor, goes wild. It ricochets, knitting a wild web of velocity trails across the corridor before settling, finally, into the meat of a conduit in the ceiling. The pipe snaps in half, and out of it tumbles a live power line, like a snake falling from a tree onto a piglet. It lands in the very puddle that earlier ruined Miss Dark's shoes. Now many watts of power course through her slender frame, and through the circuitry of gems and gold wire on the leather case of the Book of Lo. A flash turns everything white but the black roentgen skeleton of Miss Judy Dark, and she utters a somewhat unladylike cry of "YE-OOOW!"

"Nice shot," says one of the thieves. They lift the book from her slack grip and make off with it to the surface world, leaving Miss Judy Dark for dead.

Which she very well may be. She flies, hair streaming, upward through a spiral column of smoke and light. The first thing we notice about her may not be, surprisingly, that she appears to be flying in the nude, the zones of her modesty artfully veiled by the coils of the astral helix. No, what we notice first is that she appears to have grown an immense pair of swallowtailed moth's wings. They are a pale greenish-white and have a translucent quality; they might even, like Wonder Woman's airplane, be visibly invisible, at once ghostly and solid. All around her, outside the column spiraling infinitely upward, reality dissolves into dream-landscapes and wild geometric prodigies. Chessboards dissolve, parabolas bend themselves into asterisks, whorls, and pinwheels. Mysterious hieroglyphs stream past like sparks from a roman candle. Miss Dark, her great phantom wings steadily flapping, takes it all strangely in stride—for, dead or alive, there is no question that Judy Dark, that human umbrella, has, at long last, opened to the sky.

Finally, in the immeasurable and timeless distance, she makes out something that has the appearance of solidity, a smudge of stony gray, wavering. As she draws nearer, she glimpses a flash of silver, a ghostly stand of cypress, the plinth and columns of a temple, rough-hewn, pyramidal, at once Druidic and Babylonian, and withal vaguely reminiscent of the great institution in whose bowels she has for so long dreamed away her days. It looms ever larger, and then the spiral finally unravels around her and gives out, depositing her, clothed now only in the clasp of her wings, on the temple's threshold. The great doors, cast from solid silver and ornamented with crescent moons, creak as they slowly open inward to admit her. With a final glance back toward the shattered chrysalis of her old life, she steps through the portal and into a high chamber. Here, in a weird radiance cast by the tails of a thousand writhing glowworms, sits on a barbarous throne a raven-haired giantess with immense green wings, sensuously furred antennae, and a sharp expression. She is, quite obviously, the Cimmerian moth goddess, Lo. We know it before she even opens her rowanberry mouth.

"You?" the goddess says, her feelers wilting in evident dismay. "
You
are the one the book has chosen? You are to be the next Mistress of the Night?"

Miss Dark—wreathed discreetly now in curling tufts of dry-ice smoke—concedes that it seems unlikely. Only now we notice, perhaps for the first time, that our Judy is no longer wearing her glasses. Her unpinned hair strays around her face with Linda Darnell abandon. And all at once the idea of her being a Mistress of the Night—whatever that may mean—is somehow less difficult to swallow.

"Know that before my homeland, great Cimmeria, was plunged into eternal darkness," the goddess explains, "it was ruled by women." Ah, she reminisces, her face wistful, her eyes brimming, and that was a paradise! All were happy in the Queendom of Cimmeria, peaceful, contented—the men in particular. Then one shrivel-hearted malcontent, Nanok, schooled himself in the ways of bloodshed and black magic, and set himself upon an obsidian throne. He sent his armies of demons into battle against the peace-loving Cimmerians; the outcome was foreordained. Men took over the world, Lo was banished to the nether kingdoms, and the Queendom of Cimmeria was plunged into its legendary perpetual night. "And since Cimmeria fell into eternal darkness," Lo says, "men have been making a hash of things. War, famine, slavery. Things got so bad after a while that I felt obliged to send help. A champion, out of the land of darkness, to fly in darkness but always to seek the light. A
woman warrior
with power enough to help right the world's many wrongs."

Unfortunately, the goddess continues, her power is not what it once was. She is able to underwrite, as it were, only one Mistress of the Night at a time. The previous incarnation having at last, after a thousand years, grown too old, the moth goddess has sent forth her sacred book to find a new girl worthy of donning the witchy green wings of the great luna moth.

"I confess I did have someone a little more ... sturdy ... in mind," Lo says. "But I suppose that you will have to do. Go now." She waves her ancient slender hand and draws the outline of a moon in the air between herself and Judy. "Return to the mortal realm, and haunt the night in which evil so often goes prowling. You now possess all the mystic power of ancient Cimmeria."

"If you say so," Judy says. "But, well..."

"Yes? What is it?"

"I really think I'll need some
clothes."

The goddess, a serious old girl, cannot suppress the faint pale crescent of a smile. "You will find, Judy Dark, that you have only to imagine something to make it so."

"Gee whiz!"

"Take care—there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination."

"Yes. I mean, yes, mistress."

"Usually the girls come up with something involving boots. I don't know why." She shrugs, then outspreads the mighty span of her wings. "Now go, and remember, if ever you should need me, you have only to come to me in your dreams."

Worlds and aeons hence, in a dilapidated old tenement along the river, two of the thieves set to work with chisel and tongs on the gems in the ancient book's case. In a chair, in a corner, bound and gagged, Officer O'Hara sits slumped. It is still raining, there is a chill in the air, and the third thief is trying to start a fire in an old black potbellied stove.

"Here," says the first thief as he reaches to tear a sheaf of pages from the Book of Lo. "I'll bet this old thing'llburn real nice."

There is a silken rustle, like a billowing ball gown or an immense, soft pair of wings. They look up and see a giant shadow flit in through the window.

"It's a bat!" says a thief.

"It's a bird!" says another.

"It's a
lady!"
says the third, no fool, starting to run for the door.

The lady turns, eyes flashing. The garment she has imagined for herself is iridescent green, part Merry Widow, part Norman Bel Geddes, tricked out with fins and vanes and laced, with evident complexity, up the front. Her lower parts, in their tight green underpants, are barely covered by the merest suggestion of a skirt, her nine miles of leg are enmeshed in black fishnet, and the heels on her ankle boots are stingingly high. She wears a purple cowl, topped with a pair of lushly furred antennae, that covers her eyes and nose but leaves her black curls free to tumble around her bare shoulders. And from her back bloom, no longer ghostly but green as leaves, a pair of great swallowtailed moth's wings, each jeweled with a staring blind eye.

"That's right, little mouse," she cries to the man headed for the door. "Run!"

She extends her arm. Bright green light ripples from her outspread fingers and enmeshes the thief before he can reach the door. There is an unpleasant crackling sound, a snapping of twigs and pinecones, as an entire skeleton of human bones is compressed rapidly into a very small skin; then silence; then a tiny thin squeak.

"Holy cats!" the moth woman says.

"She turned Louie into a mouse!" cries the first thief. Now he is running, too.

"Freeze!" Green light leaps again, and with a crunching even more sickening than before the atoms and fibers of the thief's body are rearranged and simplified into cold blue crystals of ice. He stands gleaming like a man of diamond. The corners of his fedora glint. "Oops," the moth woman mumbles. "Goodness me!"

"What kind of a dolly are you?" the remaining thief demands. "What are you trying to do to us?"

"I just want to give you a hot time, big boy," she says, and at once the man bursts into flames of such intensity that they melt his erstwhile confederate to a shallow puddle on the floor. The mouse, its tail singed and smoking, dives for the safety of the nearest floorboard.

"Guess I still have a little bit to learn," muses the newly minted Mistress of the Night. She unties the policeman, who has begun, in all the excitement, to revive. He opens his eyes in time to see a scantily clad woman with enormous green wings jump into the sky. For a while to come he will tell himself, and half believe, that what he saw was the last apparition of a fading dream. It is not until he gets home, and goes to examine his battered handsome mug in the mirror, that he finds, on his cheek, the red butterfly imprint of her lips.

14

Deasey, as they had known he would, objected to the latest bit of degeneracy from Kavalier Clay. "I can't allow this to happen to my country," he said. "Things are bad enough already."

Sammy and Joe were not caught unprepared. "She's not showing anything any kid can't see at Jones Beach" was the line that they had decided on. Sammy gave it.

Joe said, "Just like at Jones Beach" He had never been to Jones Beach.

The morning was gloomy, and as usual in cool weather, Deasey lay spread out on the floor like an old bearskin. Now he pulled himself carefully up to a sitting position, his considerable bulk shifting audibly on his arthritic joints.

"Let me have another look," he said.

Sammy handed him the sheet of Bristol board with the character design for Luna Moth, "the first sex object," in Jules Feiffer's memorable phrase, "created expressly for consumption by little boys." It was a pinup. A woman with the legs of Dolores Del Bio, black witchy hair, and breasts each the size of her head. Her face was long, her chin pointed, and her mouth a bright red hyphen, downturned at one corner in a saucy little smirk. The pair of furry antennae hung at playful angles, as if tasting the viewer's desire.

The golden toothpick waggled up and down. "Your usual wasted effort, Mr. Kavalier, my condolences."

"Thank you."

"That means you think it could be a hit," said Sammy.

"It's very difficult to fail at pornography," said Deasey. He gazed out

beyond the river at the sere brown cliffs of New Jersey and allowed himself to recall a winter afternoon twelve years before, on a cool, sunny terrace overlooking Puerto Concepcion and the Sea of Cortez, when he had sat down at the keys of his portable Royal and begun work on a great and tragic novel, about the love between two brothers and a woman who died. Although the novel was long since abandoned, the typewriter was on his desk even now, page 232 of
Death Wears a Black Sarong
rolled around its platen. Surely, Deasey thought, that
fonda,
that terrace, that heartbreaking sky, that novel—they were all still there, waiting for him. He had only to make his way back.

"Mr. Deasey?" said Joe.

Deasey left off looking out at the expanse of sandstone sky and rusty palisade and went over to his desk. He picked up the phone.

"Fuck it," he said. "We'll leave it up to Anapol. I have a feeling they may be looking for a new kind of character, anyway."

"Why's that?" Sammy said.

Deasey looked at Sammy and then at Joe. There was something he wanted to tell them. "Why is what?"

"Why might Shelly and Jack be looking for a new kind of character?"

"I never said that. Let's call him. Get me Mr. Anapol," he said into the phone.

"What about Ashkenazy?" said Joe. "What will he say?"

Deasey said, "Do you seriously have any doubts?"

Be a u t e e f u l ." Ashkenazy sighed. "Look at those ... those ..." "They're called knockers," said Anapol.
"Look at them!
Which one of you thought this up?" said Ashkenazy. He looked at Joe with one eye while he kept the other on Luna Moth. Affluence had brought with it an entire panoply of new suits, striped and checked and boldly herringboned, madly checkered three-piece numbers, each of them the color of a different variety of squash, from butternut to Italian green. The fabrics were rich woolens and cashmeres, the cuts jazzy and loose, so that he no longer looked like a racetrack tout, with his chewed cigar end and his thumbs in his waistcoat. Now he looked like a big-time gangster with a fix in on the third at Belmont. "I bet it was you, Kavalier."