The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I never said your name.”

  “So say it now.”

  “Go home.”

  When Robert Woolfolk undraped from the steps and bid at Henry it was like his famous spaldeen throw. You could never have predicted his one bony arm would wrap around Henry’s waist so that they crumpled, knees folding together like spooning lovers, Robert on top, to the pavement of Henry’s yard. Robert didn’t punch until they were on the ground, and then he kneed and punched maniacally, his eyes and mouth and whole face squeezed shut as if he were underwater, boxing a shark. Henry wriggled into a ball. For a moment the combatants were both viewed distantly, through a haze of watery interference. Then the silence broke with a rush, the fight bobbed up from its oceanic depths and the kids pushed in close to watch. How else would they have heard the strange whining sounds, the almost animal keening which came out of both of the bodies in Henry’s yard? You were learning something. That kids fought was understood but your chances to see it were still rare. The same sound might come out of your own body one of these days. It was worth a look, worth holding back a moment from breaking it up no matter what your sympathies, which anyway weren’t so clear. Then you broke it up, shouting “Breakitup! Breakitup!”—words that emerged by fluent instinct though you’d never spoken them before. In this case, Alberto dashed into Henry’s yard and pulled Robert off by his shoulders.

  “See, see, see,” said Robert Woolfolk, breathing like a bellows, pointing his finger. Captured by Alberto, arms wrapped, he still raged toward Henry, and his and Alberto’s legs trembled like those of an animal bucking and cringing in its stall. He’d scraped the top of his hand to bleeding on the pavement or perhaps on Henry’s teeth. “See, that’s what you get, see, that’s what you get.” Robert Woolfolk elbowed out of Alberto’s embrace and stalked back to the corner of Nevins. He turned just once at the corner to scream, “See!” Almost as if it was someone’s name he was calling. Then he vanished.

  Nevins Street was a river of unhappiness running through the land of Dean Street.

  Who cleaned Robert Woolfolk’s clothes, for instance?

  He probably wouldn’t come back for a while. He’d probably come back after a while.

  Maybe he had a brother or a sister.

  Nobody could say.

  There wasn’t any way to think about it. No one was accountable. The traffic of cars and the bus rolled past under the shade of Dean Street’s trees, whirring through blobs of light and shadow. The drivers were blinded by the flicker. The men in the doorway of the rooming house advertised disregard in the way they wore their little felt hats even in this weather. They drank discreetly from a sack. Anything they thought to say they said in Spanish or kept to themselves. Probably everybody’s mother was in the kitchen making dinner now—assuming they had a mother. Nobody looked at the kids in Henry’s yard. The old white lady didn’t even look out her window so much these days.

  Sometimes the kids didn’t even look at each other. You could argue for hours about who said what or who was really there when something important happened. Pretty often it turned out that someone hadn’t been there in the first place. The girls never confirmed anything for anyone, though you’d supposed they were right there, watching. Marilla might know a given kid’s sister and you’d never hear a word about it. Days were full of gaps, probably because they were too alike. And when something big happened it was impossible to hold it clear. The gaps rushed in even there.

  Henry, for his part, revived instantly and disdained any injury, though he had a shiny stripe of blood under his nose. He sucked it back and wiped it away, swallowed. He ran his tongue around his teeth and straightened his limbs, which were on the whole a lot straighter than Robert Woolfolk’s. The fat lip was more an attitude than anything else, an earned sneer.

  “Stupid motherfucking shitty bastard.”

  “Huh.”

  “Bet you he won’t come back.”

  “Huh.”

  It was suddenly conceivable Henry had been pummeling Robert Woolfolk and not the other way around—from the way he shrugged the fight off and threw several arching stoopball home runs right afterward you had to consider whether you’d misjudged from appearances. You couldn’t always tell the winner by who was on top. They’d all seen how Robert Woolfolk ran off after Alberto pulled the fighters apart, or at least walked quickly in his loping manner, and alone.

  Here was the thing about the fight between Henry and Robert Woolfolk: Dylan Ebdus never was able to sort out whether he’d been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend by the other kids. He just couldn’t work it out, and after a while quit trying.

  The film was changing. In the early frames, the first four thousand or so, abstracted cartoonish figures had cavorted against a sort of lakeside, a shore and sky which might also be a desertscape sprouted with weeds. The figures he’d painted with his needle-thin brushes could be cactus or fungus or gas station pumps or gunfighters or charioteers or florid reefs—sometimes in his mind he named them as figures from mythology, though he knew the mythological allusions were a vestige, a literary impulse he should have already purified from his work. Yet without confessing it completely he had scrubbed a tiny golden fleece over the shoulder of one of the figures as it darted and wiggled through two or three hundred frames. He saw the figures dart and wiggle, of course, in his mind’s eye, as though the film were running on its sprockets through a projector. In fact the endless painted film was still, had never been shown. He didn’t want to run it until the end, whenever that would be. He’d been offered a hand-cranked editing device for viewing short sequences of celluloid and refused it. The stillness of the film was part of the project. Each frame bore the weight of this cumulative discretion. Together the frames made a diary of painter’s days, one which would confess its life only at the finish.

  Now the figures, the airy dancers, were expunged from the frames. They’d melted into blobs of light. He’d shelved the thinnest brushes, the jeweler’s tools, let them stiffen. The bright forms he painted now, the simpler and more luminous blobs and rectangles of color, hovered against a horizon which had evolved from the reedy, brushy lakeshore of the early frames into a distant blurred horizon, a sunset or storm over a vast and gently reflective plain. The hued forms in the foreground which he painted again and again until he knew them like language, until they moved like words through meaning into nonsense and again into purer meaning—these were beginning to merge with the horizon, to flow in and out of the depths of the tiny celluloid frames. He allowed this. In time, over many days, the forms would become what they wished. By painting them again and again with the minutest variation he would purify them and the story of their purification would be the plot of the film he was painting.

  He’d begun looking out the window. One day he loaded a large brush with paint and outlined the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower on the glass pane itself, then filled in the outline so that the painted tower blotted out the tower in the distance.

  As in the newer frames of his film, the painted glass flattened distance into proximity.

  Each time the boy visited the studio he looked different.

  His wife joked that she should have the phone company put a new line into his studio so she could call from the kitchen downstairs. When they fought now he’d forget halfway through what the point was. He knew she could easily spot that moment of surrender, when abstraction washed through his eyes, erasing language. In his mind he’d be painting a frame. His fingers twitched for the brush.

  His old teacher called from the Art Students League, to ask why he wasn’t painting anymore. He said, “I paint every day.”

  Second grade was first grade with math. Third grade was second grade with a period in the schoolyard to play kickball, a version of baseball with a giant blubbery ball, dull red and pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger th
an a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn’t look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn’t get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.

  Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There’d be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by.

  Anything you painted, however slapdash, got hung on the wall. The brushes at school, though, were like painting with your elbows if you had any point of comparison. The school paint dried like scabs.

  Nobody peed in their chair anymore.

  A book report told the story of a book.

  Second grade had two Chinese kids, and third grade had three, a soothing presence since they always had their hands up. Where they went after school was a mystery. They weren’t white and they weren’t not, so that was a plus. It prevented things from getting too black and white and Puerto Rican. At the current rate you’d all be Chinese by high school, which come to think of it might solve a few problems.

  It wasn’t their fault they were Chinese, and if you asked them about it they’d shrug—they knew it wasn’t their fault. Everyone knew. In third grade you were still only just settling into your skin and couldn’t be expected to answer for it. After that was anyone’s guess.

  chapter 3

  Vendlemachine lay on her high bed in the parlor. The gray-yellow October light which filtered through the tall curtains swarmed with motes, with writhing flecks that made the slanted light appear as solid as the polished oak spindles of the bed frame and the third-full glasses of water and cognac on the bedside table and the cane leaned against the table and more solid than the faintly stirring limbs of the tiny woman curled on the bed, now groping slowly for the cane without yet turning her light-haloed head from the pillow in which it was buried.

  “I fell asleep,” she said distantly.

  Dylan Ebdus didn’t speak, but stood not crossing the line into the room filled with the haze and piquancy of the old woman.

  “You were long.”

  Dylan found his voice. “There was a line.” He’d ferried another clutch of her hand-scratched letters on cream stationery to the post office on Atlantic Avenue and stood waiting for his turn at the Plexiglas window, studying the wanted signs and the posters promoting stamp collecting and literacy, scuffing his sneaker toes at the scraps of paper, the yellow slips and torn government envelopes that layered the floor.

  Dylan worked for Isabel Vendle for a dollar an hour each Saturday morning the year of his tenth birthday, the year of fourth grade. Vendlemachine, Vendlemachine, Dylan sang in his head, though he’d never said it aloud once beyond his own doorstep, not even whispered it alone in Isabel Vendle’s house on those days when she was away visiting family at Lake George and he used her key and let himself in through the basement door to gather her mail and pour dry food into a dish for the orange cat.

  Vendlemachine was Rachel’s word. Rachel Ebdus awarded secret nicknames to her visitors and to people who lived on Dean Street and Dylan understood they couldn’t be leaked from the house, from Rachel’s kitchen. His mother had instilled this doubleness: there were things Rachel and Dylan could say to one another and then there was the official language of the world, which, though narrowed and artificial, had to be mastered in the cause of the world’s manipulation. Rachel made Dylan know that the world shouldn’t know everything he thought about it. And it certainly shouldn’t know her words— asshole, pothead, gay, pretentious, sexy, grass —nor should the bearers of nicknames know the nicknames: Mr. Memory, Pepe le Peu, Susie Cube, Captain Vague, Vendlemachine.

  His father’s nickname was The Collector.

  Vendlemachine stayed upstairs each Saturday morning while Dylan took out the foul, liquefied garbage in the tall pail in the basement kitchen and lined the pail with a new bag. Isabel couldn’t lift a bag of garbage herself and so the smell massed for seven days, waiting for Dylan to uncork it. Then the silent and massive orange cat would creep downstairs to watch. It had a skull like a Gila monster. Dylan couldn’t know whether the orange cat loathed him or Isabel or was indifferent, couldn’t know what it understood about Dylan’s situation, so it was useless as a witness. It might not even know that Isabel wasn’t meant to be bent the way she was, might instead regard Isabel as a standard for the human form and therefore find Dylan’s shape objectionable. Nevertheless the orange cat was the only witness. It seemed to live for the moment each week when the garbage was transferred and the room inflated with the stink of coffee grinds and orange peels and stale milk.

  “I don’t want to work for you anymore,” Dylan Ebdus said to Isabel Vendle now as she swam in the coverings of her bed, in the mustiness and shadow. The orange cat sat in a solitary pool of clean sunlight near the parlor windows, ducking its reptile head rhythmically against its paw.

  Isabel moaned softly into the silence.

  Dylan waited.

  Outside the Dean Street bus breathed down the block, took the pothole which served as home plate with a clunk, then shuddered on.

  “I need you to go to the store,” Isabel said at last. “Not Ramirez. Go to Mrs. Bugge’s on Bergen.” Isabel Vendle pronounced the name of the Norwegian immigrant woman Byu-gah. Everyone else on the block called the shop on the corner of Bergen and Bond, the bodega that wasn’t a bodega because instead of Puerto Ricans it was run by a fat white woman with tiny eyes, Buggy’s.

  Ho, snap—you lifted some cakes from Buggy’s? I heard Buggy’s German shepherd once bit a kid’s ass off.

  Isabel raised her arm from the bed and let her fingertips fall on the side table. Her nails rapped lightly. Dylan came close, crossing the invisible line into the aquarium light of Isabel’s parlor bedroom, to gather the bills which lay there.

  “Kraft American slices, Thomas’ muffins, and a quart of milk.” The old woman spoke as if describing a recurrent dream. “Five dollars should be enough.”

  Dylan crumpled Isabel’s money into his pocket, wondering now if he’d spoken aloud. “I, don’t, want, to, work—” he began again, softly, carefully, spacing the words.

  “Skim milk,” said Isabel.

  “Idon’twanttoworkforyou,” Dylan said quickly.

  The orange cat blinked up.

  “It tastes like water,” Isabel mused. “White water.”

  The block was empty except for a couple of teenagers on Alberto’s stoop near the corner. Dylan didn’t know where the kids were. It was October, getting colder, everyone was wearing jackets and ranging away from the block. Henry left to play football in the schoolyard near Smith Street and Earl just didn’t come out. Somebody had left a bottle in a bag on the stoop of the abandoned house. Days before there’d been a guy sleeping on the stoop, one of those drinkers who just nested for a while. A stained paper bag was like a pissed pair of green pants, it was only a matter of where the leak showed. That’s why they called it a leak.

  Dylan cornered Bond Street, feeling how irrational a block was, one face so familiar, the housefronts and slate walk a surfaced iceberg, one with Dylan’s own flag planted on it, his chalk skully boards, the ghostly traces of his chasing down a ball or being tagged It. The rest of the block was under water. Dylan for years had clung to this one face, bent over the slates as though they were sheets of Spirograph paper on the floor of his room, not noticing until too late that they were part of an edifice which curled past Bond and Nevins Street, into the unknown. He’d sooner take Isabel’s letters all the way to Atlantic Avenue to the post office than walk around the corner to Buggy’s. He didn’t trust Bergen Street. He could feel the sidewalk tilt there.

  Robert Woolfolk sat draped on the stoop beside Buggy’s, leaned back just as he had been on Henry’s the day of the fight, the knuckles of his knees seeming higher than his
shoulders though they rested two steps lower. Dylan stopped there before the store, commanded. The sun of the day made a desert of light all around them, and the traffic was still and distant. Dylan could see the bus up near Smith Street, where it seemed to rest at a tilt, fatigued. Dylan heard church bells.

  “You work for that old lady?”

  Dylan tried to shake his head for a thousand reasons. He thought of Isabel swimming in her bed, the nearest authority for miles. Or there was Buggy and her dog, a pane of glass away, but they were entombed inside a cave of products, rice, bicarbonate, Nestlé’s Quik. The store was so dark inside Dylan imagined Buggy would wilt if she ever stepped out into the sun.

  “You got her money in your pocket?”

  Dylan was certain he’d said nothing.

  “How much you got?”

  “I have to buy milk,” Dylan said dumbly.

  “How much she pay you for doing her errands, a dollar? You got it on you now?”

  “She gives it to my mother,” Dylan lied spontaneously, amazing himself.

  Robert only turned his head quizzically, lazily, and swung his hand where it dangled from the step, as though just then discovering his wrist’s capacity for motion. His slung weight didn’t cleave from the stoop.

  The two of them were in a rehearsal for something, Dylan sensed. How much of something, and whether it was personal to him and Robert or larger than that, he couldn’t yet say.

  So he stood frozen while Robert continued to examine him.

  “Go buy milk,” Robert said at last.

  Dylan moved for Buggy’s door.

  “But if you come around here with that old lady’s money next time I might have to take it off you.”

  Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical musing. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required.