Sublime

Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance. Kornblum knew at once that his unexpected visitor must be Josef Kavalier, and his heart sank. He had heard months ago that the boy was withdrawing from art school a

eponymous

For days, he stood in the cold shower of her imagined anger, which he felt he entirely deserved. Not only for having left her pregnant and in the lurch, so that he might go off in a failed pursuit of an impossible revenge; but for having never returned, never telephoned or dropped a line, never once thought of her—so he imagined that she imagined—i

He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orch

His wife and son were becoming other people, new people, people who found Jack more and more unnecessary.

“Your Captain fought back,” she told him. “He resisted, he wouldn’t let them take his identity. He died free.”

majordomo

He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong. He’ll die without knowing what she’s powerless to tell him—that he has helped her. That his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.