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"I did the easy thing," Sammy said. "Try it, you'll see." He returned his attention to the sheet of Bristol board in his hands, part of the long sequence at the end of the first chapter that offered a brief history of golems through the ages. "So," he said, "they make a goat."
"Uh, yes," Joe said. "Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaya."
"A goat golem."
"Out of earth."
"And then…" Sammy's finger traced the course of the episode down and across the page. "After they go to all this trouble. It looks like it's kind of dangerous, making a golem."
"It is."
"After all that, they just… they eat it?"
Joe shrugged. "They were hungry," he said.
Sammy said that he knew how they felt, and even though he seemed to mean the remark to be taken only literally, Joe had a sudden vision of Sammy and Rosa, kneeling together beside a flickering crucible, working to fashion something that would sustain them out of the materials that came to hand.
He rode down to the lobby and sat at the counter of the Empire State Pharmacy, on his usual stool, though for once without the usual dark glasses and false whiskers or watch cap pulled down past his eyebrows to the orbits of his eyes. He ordered a plate of fried eggs and a pork chop, as he always did. He sat back and cracked his knuckles. He saw the counterman giving him a look. Joe stood up and, in a small display of theatrics, moved two stools down the line, so that he was sitting right beside the window that looked out on Thirty-third Street, where anyone could see him.
"Make that a cheeseburger," he said.
While he listened to the hissing of the pale pink leaf of meat on the grill, Joe looked out the window and mulled over the things that Sammy had just revealed. He had never given much consideration to the feelings that had, for a few months during the fall and winter of 1941, drawn his cousin and Tracy Bacon together. To the small extent that he had ever given the matter any thought at all, Joe had assumed that Sammy's youthful flirtation with homosexuality had been just that, a freak dalliance born of some combination of exuberance and loneliness that had died abruptly, with Bacon, somewhere over the Solomon Islands. The sudde
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 mayo
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.
Joe went over to a stack of boxes and sat down. Sammy lit up the cigarette and flipped-a bit carelessly, to Joe's mind-through the last dozen or so pages. He set his cigarette down atop the still-wrapped sandwich and tied the pages back into the last portfolio. He jabbed the cigarette back into his mouth, unwrapped the sandwich, and bit away a quarter of it, chewing while he smoked.
"So?"
"So," Sammy said. "You have an awful lot of Jewish stuff in here."
"I know it."
"What's the matter with you, did you have a relapse?"
"I eat a pork chop every day." Joe reached over into a nearby box and pulled out the jacketless book with its softened pages and cracked spine.
"Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel," Sammy read. "By Angelo S. Rappoport." He flipped through the pages, eyeing Joe with a certain respectful skepticism, as if he thought he had found the secret to Joe's salvation, which he was now obliged to doubt. "You're into all this now?"