UNDER ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES, the trip downtown to the German consulate discouraged Joe; today he found it difficult even to get himself on to the subway. He felt obscurely furious with Sheldon Anapol. He took a comic book out of the hip pocket of his jacket and tried to read. He had become a constant and careful consumer of comic books. By stalking the Fourth Avenue bookstalls, he had managed to acquire a copy of nearly every one that had been published in the past few years, acquiring also, while he was at it, stacks of old Sunday New York Mirrors so that he could study Burne Hogarth's vehement, precise, and painterly work in Tarzan. The same masturbatory intensity of concentration that Joe had once brought to the study of magic and wireless sets he now focused on the fledgling, bastard, wide-open art form into whose raffish embrace he had fallen. He noticed how strong the influence of movies was on artists like Joe Shuster and Batman's Bob Kane, and began to experiment with a cinematic vocabulary: an extreme close-up, say, on the face of a terrified child or soldier, or a zoom shot, drawing ever closer, over the course of four panels, on the battlements and keep of a grim Zothenian redoubt. From Hogarth he learned to trouble over the emotional occasion, so to speak, of a panel, choosing carefully, among the infinitude of potential instants to arrest and depict, the one in which the characters' emotions were most extreme. And from reading the comic books that featured art by the great Louis Fine, like the one in his hands right now, Joe learned to view the comic book hero, in his formfitting costume, not as a pulp absurdity but as a celebration of the lyricism of the naked (albeit tinted) human form in motion. It was not all violence and retribution in the early stories of Kavalier & Clay; Joe's work also articulated the simple joy of unfettered movement, of the able body, in a way that captured the yearnings not only of his crippled cousin but of an entire generation of weaklings, stumblebums, and playground goats.

Today, however, he could not seem to focus on the copy of Wonder-world Comics that he had brought along. His thoughts veered between irritation with the giddiness, the indecency, of Anapol's sudden prosperity and dread of his appointment with the Adjutant for Minority Relocation at the German consulate on Whitehall Street. It was not the prosperity itself he resented, for that was a measure of his and Sammy's success, but rather the disproportionate share of it that was going to Anapol and Ashkenazy, when it was he and Sammy who had invented the Escapist and were doing all the work of bringing him to life. No, it was not even that. It was the impotence of the money, and of all the pent-up warlike fancies that had earned it, to do anything but elaborate the wardrobe and fatten the financial portfolios of the owners of Empire Comics that so frustrated and enraged him. And there was nothing guaranteed to emphasize his fundamental powerlessness more thoroughly than a morning spent with Adjutant Milde at the German consulate. There was no pursuit more disheartening than the immigration goose chase.

Whenever he found himself with an empty morning or a week between issues, Joe would put on a good suit, a sober tie, a neatly blocked hat, and set out as he had this morning, burdened by an ever swelling satchel of documents, to try to make headway in the case of the Kavaliers of Prague. He paid endless visits to the offices of HIAS, to the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees and Overseas Needs, to travel agents, to the New York office of the President's Action Committee, to the wonderfully polite Adjutant at the German consulate with whom he had an appointment for ten o'clock that morning. To a certain cross section of clerks in that city of rubber stamps, carbon paper, and spindles, he had become a familiar figure, a slender, tall twenty-year-old with nice manners and a rumpled suit, appearing in the middle of a stifling afternoon, looking painfully cheerful. He would doff his hat. The clerk or secretary-a woman, more often than not-pinned to a hard chair by a thousand cubic feet of smoky, rancid air that caught like batter in the blades of the ceiling fans, deafened by the thunder of file cabinets, dyspeptic, despairing, and bored, would look up and see that Joe's thick thatch of curls had been deformed by his headgear into a kind of glossy black hat, and smile.

"I come to be pesky once again," Joe would say, in his increasingly slang-deformed English, and then take from the breast pocket of his jacket a slim humidor filled with five fifteen-cent panatelas or, when the clerk was a woman, a folding paper fan patterned with pink flowers, or simply a pearly-cold bottle of Coca-Cola. And she would take the fan or the soda pop, and listen to his pleas, and want to help him very much. But there was little to be done. Every month, Joe's income increased, and every month, he managed to put more and more money away, only to find that there was nothing to spend it on. The bribes and bureaucratic lubrications of the first years of the protectorate were a thing of the past. At the same time, obtaining a United States visa, never an easy thing, had become nearly impossible. By last month, when his own permanent residency had been approved, he had accumulated and sent to the State Department seven affidavits from noted New York gland doctors and psychiatrists attesting to the fact that the three senior members of his family would be unique and valuable additions to the populace of his adopted country. With each passing month, however, the number of refugees making their way to America shrank, and the news from home grew darker and more fragmentary. There was word of relocations, resettlements; the Jews of Prague were all to be sent to Madagascar, to Terezin, to a vast autonomous reservation in Poland. And Joe found himself in receipt of three officially discouraging letters from the Undersecretary for Visas, and a polite suggestion that he make no further inquiries in this regard.

His sense of entrapment in the toils of bureaucracy, of being powerless to help or free his family, also found its way into the comics. For as the Escapist's powers were augmented, the restraints required to contain him, either by his enemies or (as happened more rarely now) by himself when he was performing, grew more elaborate, even baroque. There were gigantic razor-jawed bear traps, tanks filled with electric sharks. The Escapist was tied to immense gas rings into which his captors needed only to toss a stray cigar butt to incinerate him, strapped to four rumbling panzers pointed in the cardinal directions, chained to an iron cherry at the bottom of an immense steel tumbler into which a forty-ton frothing "milkshake" of fresh concrete was poured, hung from the spring-loaded firing pin of an immense cannon aimed at the capital of "Occupied Latvonia" so that if he freed himself, thousands of innocent citizens would die. The Escapist was laid, lashed and manacled, in the paths of threshing machines, pagan juggernauts, tidal waves, and swarms of giant prehistoric bees revived by the evil science of the Iron Chain. He was imprisoned in ice, in strangling vines, in cages of fire.

Now it seemed very warm in the subway car. The fan in the center of the ceiling was motionless. A bead of sweat splashed a panel in the story about the fire-spewing Flame, lean and balletic in the great Lou Fine style, that Joe had been pretending to read. He closed the comic book and stuck it back in his pocket. He began to feel that he could not breathe. He loosened his tie and walked down to the end of the car, where there was an open louver. A faint black ripple of breeze blew from the tunnel, but it was sour and unrefreshing. At the Union Square station, a seat became available and Joe took it. He sat back and closed his eyes. He could not seem to rid his mind of the phrase superintend its population of Jews. All of his greatest fears for his family's safety seemed to lie folded within the bland envelope of that first word. Over the past year, his family had had their bank accounts frozen. They had been forced out of the public parks of Prague, out of the sleeping and dining cars of the state railways, out of the public schools and universities. They could no longer even ride the streetcars. Lately the regulations had grown more complex. Perhaps in an effort to expose the telltale badge of a yarmulke, Jews were now forbidden to wear caps. They were not allowed to carry knapsacks. They were not permitted to eat onions or garlic; also banned was the eating of apples, cheese, or carp.