The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (62 page)

"I came here to fly airplanes," he said.

let it be not doubtful that we thought only to serve our country (adopted in my case).

Please see to the care of the men in quarters who are dead and frozen.

Respectfully,

Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Class.

September 12, 1944.

He pulled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, then rolled it in again, and left it like that. Shannenhouse came over to read it, nodded once, and then went back out to the Hangar to see to the plane.

Joe lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, but the sense of conclusiveness, of putting his affairs in order, which he had sought in typing up a final statement, eluded him. He lit a cigarette and took a deep draft of it, and tried to clear his mind and conscience so that he could face the next day and its duties untroubled by any scruple or distraction. When he had finished his smoke, he rolled over and tried to sleep, but the memory of Oyster's single trusting blue eye would not leave his mind. He turned, and tossed, and tried to lull himself to sleep, as Rosa had once instructed him to do, by imagining that he lay floating on a black raft, on a warm black lagoon, in the blackness of a moonless tropical night. There was nothing inside or outside of him but soft warm blackness. Presently he felt himself slipping toward sleep, pouring into it like sand racing toward the neck of an hourglass. In this twilit hypnogogic state he began to imagine—but it was stronger than a mere imagining, it was as if he were remembering the fact, believing it—that Oyster had been capable of speech, had possessed a sweet, calm, plaintive voice capable of expressing reason and passion and concern, and that he could not now get the dead dog's voice out of his ears. We had so much to say to each other, he thought. What a shame that I only realized it now. Then in the instant before he went under, a sharp barking sounded in his inner ear and he sat bolt upright, his heart pounding. He realized that it was not the betrayed love of Oyster, but of someone far dearer and more lost to him, that haunted him now and prevented him from making peace with the possibility of his own death.

He crawled down to the foot of the bunk and opened his footlocker, and took out the thick sheaf of letters that he had received from Rosa after his enlistment at the end of 1941. The letters had followed him, irregularly but steadily, from basic training at Newport, Rhode Island, to the navy's polar training station at Thule, Greenland, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he had spent the fall of 1943 as the Kelvinator mission was assembled. After that, as no reply from their addressee was ever forthcoming, there had been no more letters. Her correspondence had been like the pumping of a heart into a severed artery, wild and incessant at first, then slowing with a kind of muscular reluctance to a stream that became a trickle and finally ceased; the heart had stopped.

Now he took out the penknife that had been a gift from Thomas, and that had once saved the life of Salvador Dali, and slit open the first of the letters.

Dear Joe,

I wish that we could at least have said goodbye to each other before you left New York. I think I understand why you ran away. I am sure that you must blame me for what happened. If I had not sent you to Hermann Hoffman, then your brother would not have been on that ship. I don't know what would have become of him in that case. And neither do you. But I accept and understand that you might hold me responsible. I suppose that I might have run away, too.

I know that you still love me. It's an article of faith for me that you do and that you always will. And it breaks my heart to think that we might never see or touch each other ever again. But what is even more painful to me is the thought—the certainty I have— that right now you are wishing that you and I had never met. If that is true, and I know it is, then I wish the same thing. Because knowing that you could feel that way about me makes all that we had seem like nothing at all. It was all wasted time. That is something I will never accept, even if it's true.

I don't know what is going to happen to you, to me, to the country or the world. And I don't expect you to answer this letter, because I can feel the door to you slamming in my face and I know that it's you slamming it shut. But I love you, Joe, with or without your consent. So that is how I plan to write to you—with or without your consent. If you don't want to hear from me, just throw away this and all the letters that follow it. For all I know these words themselves are lying at the bottom of the sea.

I have to go now. I love you.

Rosa

He read through the rest of them after that, proceeding in chronological order. In the second letter, she mentioned that Sammy had quit his job at Empire and gone to work for Burns, Baggot DeWinter, the advertising agency that handled the Oneonta Woolens account. In the evenings, she said, he came home and worked on his novel. Then, in her fifth letter, Joe was startled to read that, in a civil ceremony on New Year's Day of 1942, Rosa had married Sammy. After that, there was a gap of three months, and she wrote to say that she and Sammy had bought a house in Midwood. Then there was another gap of a few months, and then in September 1942 she wrote with the news that she had given birth to a seven-pound, two-ounce son, and that, in honor of Joe's lost brother, they had named the baby Thomas. She called him Tommy. Subsequent letters gave news and details of little Tommy's first words, first steps, illnesses, and prodigies—at the age of fourteen months, he had drawn a recognizable circle with a pen. The scrap of paper place mat from Jack Dempsey's restaurant on which he had drawn it was included in the envelope. It was wobbly and poorly closed off, but it was, as Rosa said in the letter, as round as a baseball. There was a single photograph of the child, in undershirt and diaper, holding himself up against a table on which some comic books lay scattered. His head was big and luminous and pale as the moon, his expression at once wondering and hostile, as if the camera frightened him.

Had Joe read the letters from Rosa as they arrived, with gaps of weeks and months between them, he might have been deceived by the falsifying of the date of baby Thomas's birth, but read all at once—as a kind of continuous narrative—the letters betrayed just enough inconsistency in their accounting of months and milestones that Joe became suspicious, and his initial stab of jealousy and his deep puzzlement over Rosa's hasty marriage to Sammy gave way to a sad understanding. The letters were like fragments from a old-fashioned novel—they contained not only a mysterious birth and a questionable marriage, but a couple of deaths as well. In the spring of 1942, old Mrs. Kavalier had died, in her sleep, at the age of ninety-six. And then a letter from late summer of 1943, just after Joe's arrival in Cuba, reported the fate of Tracy Bacon. The actor had joined the Army Air Forces shortly after completing the second Escapist serial,
The Escapist and the Axis of Death,
and had been shipped to the Solomon Islands. In early June, the Liberator bomber of which Bacon was the copilot had been shot down during a raid on Rabaul. At the bottom of this letter, the last letter in the packet, there was a brief postscript from Sammy.
Hi buddy
was all it said.

Until now, Joe had told himself that he had buried his love for Rosa in the same deep hole in which he had laid his grief for his brother. She had been right: in the immediate aftermath of Thomas's death, he had blamed her, not merely for having introduced him to Hermann Hoffman and his cursed ship but also more vaguely and more crucially for having lured him into betraying the singleness of purpose—the dogged cultivation of a pure and unshakable anger—that had marked his first year of exile from Prague. He had all but abandoned the fight, allowed his thoughts to stray fatally from the battle, betrayed himself to the seductions of New York and Hollywood and Rosa Saks—and been punished for it. Although his need—indeed, his ability—to blame Rosa for all this had passed with time, his renewed resolve and his craving for revenge, which grew in intensity as it was frustrated again and again by the inscrutable plans of the U.S. Navy, so filled his heart that he believed his love to have been completely extinguished, as a great fire can put out a smaller one by starving it of oxygen and fuel. Now, as he returned the last letter to the packet, he was almost sick with longing for Mrs. Rosa Clay of Van Pelt Street, Midwood, Brooklyn.

Sammy had once told him about the capsule that had been buried at the World's Fair, in which typical items of that time and place—some nylon stockings, a copy of
Gone with the Wind,
a Mickey Mouse drinking cup—had been buried in the ground, to be recovered and marveled at by the people of some future gleaming New York. Now, as he read through these thousands of words that Rosa had written to him, and her raspy, plaintive voice sounded in his ear, his entombed memories of Rosa were hauled up as from a deep shaft within him. The lock on the capsule was breached, the hasps were thrown, the hatch opened, and with a ghostly whiff of lily of the valley and a fluttering of moths, he remembered—he allowed himself to enjoy a final time—the stickiness and weight of her thigh thrown over his belly in the middle of a hot August night, her breath against the top of his head and the pressure of her breast against his shoulder as she gave his hair a trim in the kitchen of his apartment on Fifth Avenue, the burble and glint of the
Trout
Quintet playing in the background as the smell of her cunt, rich and faintly smoky like cork, perfumed an idle hour in her father's house. He recalled the sweet illusion of hope that his love for her had brought him. When he had finished the last letter, he slipped it back into its envelope. He went back to Wahoo Fleer's typewriter, pulled out the statement he had left, and laid it carefully on the desk. Then he rolled in a clean sheet and typed:

To be delivered to Mrs. Rosa Clay of Brooklyn U.S.A.

Dear Rosa,

It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age. As for the child, who can only be our son, I wish

This time he could not think how to continue. He was astonished at the course that life could take, at the way things that had seemed once to concern him so much—indeed to revolve around him—could turn out to have nothing to do with him at all. The little boy's name, and his serious, wide-eyed stare in the photograph, jabbed at some place inside Joe that was so broken and raw that he felt it as a kind of mortal danger to consider the child for very long. Since he did not plan to return alive, one way or another, from the trip to Jotunheim, he told himself that the boy was much better off without him. He made up his mind then and there, sitting at the desk of the dead captain, that in the unlikely event his plan went awry and he should find himself somehow still living at war's end, he would never have anything to do with any of them, but in particular with this sober and fortunate American boy. He pulled the letter out of the typewriter and folded it into an envelope on which he typed the words "In the event also of my death." He laid his envelope under that in which Captain Fleer had made his final wishes known. He tied up the packet of letters and photographs from Rosa and fed them, in a single swallow, to Wayne. Then he picked up his sleeping bag and went out to the radio shack to see if he could tune in Radio Jotunheim.

5

Shannenhouse spent a minute considering the cloudless sky, the light wind from the southeast. They had had a weatherman, Brodie, but even when he had been alive, Shannenhouse had disdained his counsel, agreeing with his old friend Lincoln Ellsworth that no one could predict the weather in this place. As long as they could get the plane off the ground, they might as well go. He was complaining of bowel troubles, and Joe afterward said in his report that he noticed Shannenhouse looked a little pale, but attributed this to drink. They backed the tractor up to the ramp once again and hooked the plane to it. This time the winch performed correctly, and they got the plane up onto the surface. While Shannenhouse set to work heating the engines and readying the plane, Joe loaded on their gear. They closed up all the hatches on the buildings and took a look around at the place that had been their home for the last nine months.

"I will be glad to get out of here," Shannenhouse said. "I just wish we were going someplace different."

Joe went to the tip of the wing where Oyster was. In his haste, Shannenhouse had not done an especially good job, and the skin looked half-cured and hung a little loose and puckered over the frame. The entire airplane had a pied appearance, reddish-brown blotches of seal stitched against a background of silver-gray, as if it had been splashed with blood. Where the dog skins were, the plane looked bleached and sickly.

"Now or never, Dopey," said Shannenhouse. He pressed a hand to his side.

Thirty seconds later, they were bumping and scraping over ground as jagged and shining as rock candy, and then something seemed to cup its hand underneath and bear them up. Shannenhouse let out a cowboyish yip, a little shyly.

"Never going to know what hit him," he shouted over the basso profundo chorusing of the big twin Cyclones.

Joe said nothing. He never told Shannenhouse that the night before, just before he lay down in his sleeping bag, he had broken the fictitious invisible barrier that had hitherto been maintained between Kelvinator Station and Jotunheim, transmitting the following six words to the Geologist, in German plaintext, at one of the frequencies regularly used by Berlin to contact him:

WE ARE COMING TO GET YOU