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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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