The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Dylan was torn between wanting to claim to possess merit badges in skully, Etch A Sketch, sneaking down creaky stairs, and drawing “Skippy” and a desire to protect Mingus Rude from mockery, theft, incomprehension. He could already hear Yo, let me see it, let me check it out, what—you don’t trust me? He wished to protect them both by commanding the new boy never to bring any of these madly fertile and irrelevant possessions out onto the block for any other kid to see.

  Dylan tangled in silence. There in the high-fenced sanctuary of the backyard he wanted to heap the various uniforms in a bonfire, like the one Henry and Alberto had once set on the stoop of the abandoned house, igniting smoldering newspapers and dried dog shit and the stinky green late-summer ailanthus branches which had fallen to litter the street everywhere. Dylan wanted Mingus Rude and himself to build a fire and smother the uniforms in damp smoke until the plastic blackened and melted, until the numbers and names, the evidence, was destroyed. A Dean Street fire, no merit badges involved. Instead he watched as Mingus Rude somberly packed the uniforms into the bottom of his closet.

  “You like comics?” said Mingus Rude.

  “Sure,” said Dylan unsure. My mother likes them, he almost said.

  Mingus Rude excavated four comic books from the closet floor: Daredevil #77, Black Panther #4, Doctor Strange #12, The Incredible Hulk #115. They’d been tenderly handled to death, corners rounded, paper browned by hot attentive breath, pages chewed by eyes. MINGUS RUDE was written in slanted ballpoint capitals on each first interior page. Mingus read certain panels aloud, incanting them, shaping Dylan’s attention, shaping his own. Dylan felt himself permeated by some ray of attention, moved so that he felt an uncanny warmth in the half of his chest that was turned toward Mingus. He wanted to put his hand in Mingus Rude’s crispy-looking hair.

  “You know what they say now? Doctor Strange could take the Incredible Hulk by making some kind of mystical cage but he couldn’t take Thor because Thor’s a godlike figure, as long as he doesn’t lose his hammer. If he loses his hammer dude’s nothing better than a cripple.”

  “Who’s Thor?”

  “You’ll see. You know where to buy comics?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Dylan thought of Croft, that afternoon on Isabel Vendle’s deck, the newsstand on the traffic island at Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic. The Fantastic Four.

  Could Doctor Strange “take” the Fantastic Four? he wondered.

  “Ever steal comics?”

  “No.”

  “It’s no big thing. You go to camp this year?”

  “No.” No year, Dylan almost said. He’d found an artifact on Mingus’s dresser, a sort of tuning fork.

  “That’s a pick,” said Mingus.

  “Oh.”

  “Like a comb, for black hair. It ain’t nothing. Want to see a gold record?”

  Dylan nodded mutely, dropped the pick. Mingus Rude was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities.

  Dylan wondered how long he’d be able to keep him to himself.

  They crept upstairs. His father had abandoned to Mingus Rude the spectacular gift of the entire basement level: two rooms to himself, and possession of the magically blank backyard. Mingus Rude’s father lived on the parlor floor. Like Isabel Vendle, Barrett Rude Junior slept in a bed opposite the heavily ornate marble mantelpiece, behind the shaded light of the tall windows, the showpiece windows meant for front parlors filled with pianos and upholstery, eighteenth-century Bibles on stands, who knew what else. But unlike Isabel Vendle’s, Barrett Rude Junior’s bed, which lay on the floor there under the scrolled Dutch ceiling, was a wide flat bag filled, as Mingus Rude demonstrated in passing with a neat two-palmed shove, with actual water, an undulating sea trapped in slick sheets. The two gold records were, oddly, just what their name promised, gold records, 45s, glued to white matting and framed in stained aluminum, not up on the bare walls but propped on the crowded mantel beside balled dollar bills and half-filled glasses and empty packs of Kools. “(NO WAY TO HELP YOU) EASE YOUR MIND” (B. RUDE, A. DEEHORN, M. BROWN), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD MAY 28, 1970,was the legend on one, and “BOTHERED BLUE” (B. RUDE), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD FEBRUARY 19, 1972,the other.

  “Downstairs,” said Mingus Rude. They left the gold records behind. Dylan walked ahead on the stairs, feeling strangely formal as he gripped the banister, imagining Mingus Rude’s gaze on his back.

  In the backyard they winged rocks into the sky, let them plop into the Puerto Ricans’ yard. Mostly Mingus, Dylan watching. It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close. You could hear the steady ding of a Mister Softee truck on Bergen Street, probably with a string of the usual kids hanging on it.

  “My grandpop’s a preacher,” said Mingus Rude.

  “Really?”

  “Barrett Rude Senior. That’s where my daddy started singing, in his church. But he doesn’t have a church anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s in jail.”

  “Oh.”

  “I guess you know my mother’s white,” said Mingus Rude.

  “Sure.”

  “White women like black men, you heard that, right?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “My father don’t talk to that lying bitch no more.” He followed this with a sharp laugh of self-surprise.

  Dylan didn’t say anything.

  “He paid a million dollars for me. That’s what he had to pay to get me back, a million cold. You can ask him if you think I’m lying.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I don’t care if you believe me, it’s true.”

  Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language, wanted to know if the new kid had changed Dean Street or only changed Dylan himself by arriving here. Mingus Rude breathed through his mouth and his tongue curled out of one side of his mouth with the effort of a throw. Mingus was black but lighter, a combination. The palms of his hands were as white as Dylan’s. He wore corduroys. Anything was possible, really.

  A million-dollar kid doesn’t belong on Dean Street, Dylan wanted to say. The word million, even.

  Mingus Rude might be insane, Dylan didn’t mind.

  Two days later he was already playing, standing in the street, a catcher in stoopball, taking a lean on a parked car to let the bus go by. Like he’d been there all along. He caught laconically, perfectly. He might be the Henry of his own block, now transported here—he might be a Henry of the mind, recognizable anywhere. Dylan crept up and sat on Henry’s wall and watched, with Earl and a couple girls, younger kids. Mingus Rude was viable, apparently. He’d been folded into the ongoing game while Dylan wasn’t looking.

  Robert Woolfolk wasn’t around. Otherwise the last splendid day had shucked every verifiable kid out onto Dean Street. Two girls turned a rope with three others inside, their knees shining like a bunch of grapes. The empty, blue-tiled school, Public School 38, hummed, just down the block. Nobody looked at it, nobody cared.

  “D-Man.”

  “John Dillinger.”

  “D-Lone. Lonely D.”

  Dylan didn’t know what Mingus Rude was yelling about, didn’t recognize himself in the nicknames.

  “Yo, Dylan, you deaf?”

  Captaincy was an essence lurking in Henry above all. But one captain needed another, even if inferior, a stooge. Someone had to step up. Dylan had seen Alberto assume it, Lonnie too, once even Robert Woolfolk, to make a lopsided game of punchball, fast dissolved in scowls and a faked limp. Now, at the bright weary end of summer, Henry and Mingus Rude were stickball captains, unexplained.

  Mingus chose Dylan first, over Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, anyone.

  “He can’t hit,” said Henry. It was a reasonably sympathetic diagnosis. Dylan was any captain’s problem, a communal drag.

  “I got Dillinger,” said Mingus Rude coolly. He wrapped and rewrapped the wrist fastener of a Philadelphia Phillies batting glove
, teasing reminder of the motherlode of outfits buried in his closet. “Take your man.”

  That last August afternoon before school began was something like those heartbreaking, dazzling glimpses of the opening credits for Star Trek or Mission Impossible, before you were commanded to switch the television off and go to bed: it was going to haunt you, play inside your eyelids, after the door was closed, the light extinguished, your pounding rib cage calmed. A summer was unfinished, broken off at the end, a bad splice. Now, Mingus Rude’s arrival promised the possibility of another summer, hinged to this one like a door you couldn’t look beyond.

  The palm-sweaty broomstick was wrapped with new black tape, like the hockey-stick handle.

  “Lead off, Dill.”

  The names, Dylan began to understand, conveyed that he and Mingus were to be one thing to each other indoors, off the street, and entirely another outside. On the block.

  Inside, outside, a distinction Dylan understood. Could work with.

  Henry pitched. Dylan waved at something barely seen, like a bee overhead. “Ball one,” said Mingus Rude, captain, umpire, announcer.

  “Ball one?” scoffed Henry. “Dude chased it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Mingus. “Too high.” To Dylan he said: “Don’t swing at that shit.” To Henry: “Strike zone.” Then back to Dylan, he whispered. “Don’t close your eyes.”

  You evolved in full view and secretly at once, grew bony and hairy, twisted out a baby tooth and spat blood and kept playing, claimed to know certain words the first time you heard them. A day came when you made contact, stung it somewhere not foul, rounded first before the bat clattered to stillness in the street. It was no big thing, you weren’t looking for congratulations. Dylan danced off on the manhole cover, second base, daring the throw, the next order of business. Reward for trickling the ball between Alberto’s feet. Leading off, batting one thousand.

  Any private thrill was like peeing your pants. Dylan knew to be ashamed of the relief.

  He scored on Mingus Rude’s own home run. Struck out hyperventilating his next time up. But. Five kids in a batting order and no defense to speak of, you’d get up a hundred times on a night like this. Strike out ninety. Lace it off a lamppost and call it a triple, didn’t matter—you could bunt a triple in the dark. The close of this day you’d resist like sleep, like sickness. One kid’s mom yelled for half an hour and even then nobody else paid attention, nobody went inside.

  Rachel Ebdus didn’t call from the stoop. Dylan Ebdus wondered if Rachel and Abraham were taking the opportunity to kick each other’s ass in one form or another.

  Given that he was outside at this particular moment, Dylan didn’t care.

  Didn’t give a shit.

  Fuck you know about it, anyway?

  If. Mingus Rude was a scant four months older than Dylan Ebdus, but those four months hit the calendar such that Mingus was a grade ahead, had finished fifth grade in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Like Henry and Alberto, Mingus Rude would start sixth this year, at the Intermediate School 293 annex, on Butler Street between Smith and Hoyt, in the turf of the Gowanus Houses. No-man’s-land.

  “Dill- icious,” Mingus called him once as he stood at the plate.

  I.S. 293 was a hidden sun drawing kids screaming out of Dean Street’s orbit, one by one. If Mingus Rude was four months younger, if Mingus Rude and Dylan Ebdus had been headed to grade five together, if. Then Dylan could have watched out for him, maybe. Kept an eye.

  A grade of school was a bridge in mist. No way to picture where it touched land again, or who you’d be when it did.

  One stickball game was your whole career, your whole life to this point.

  These weren’t innings, they were dreams of innings. You couldn’t remember who got the last out, you could barely recall the batting order until it was just two guys, Mingus and Dylan. Gus and D-Man. Another kid quit and Henry had to pitch from the outfield. You could do just so much, trap a grounder with your body like a grenade, fish it from behind a tire and lash it toward home base, maybe hit the ass of the guy who’d scored. The pink spaldeen turned black, like a piece of night. Some Puerto Rican guy reparked third base, pissed off at fingerprints. The spaces between outs were like summers themselves.

  Public School 38 was on fire. No it wasn’t.

  If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan’s pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn’t give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.

  Your school wasn’t on fire, you were.

  — and now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life she found herself quoting in her hospital bed at Long Island College Hospital on Henry Street, where the television bolted to the ceiling showing Ryan’s Hope and The Gong Show had to stand for a hearth, brutally angry and brutally fat Jamaican nurses for her lonely company, her vigil. She’d die in Brooklyn Heights instead of Boerum Hill because Boerum Hill had a jail instead of a hospital— and Major Amberson realized that everything which had worried or delighted him during this lifetime, all this buying and building —and not in her bed beneath her parlor ceiling because the oar had dented her, crushed her, folded her like a letter into the envelope of herself, unread for fifty-two years. Unreadable medically now, at the end: she’d watched the interns puzzling at her X rays—how can this be nestled beside this ? How can old Vendle fit into herself, how’d she do it, all these years? Her body was Boerum Hill, just as King Arthur’s body had been England. She was all of Boerum Hill’s contradictions crushed together: she was the Schlitz can in the brown paper sack sitting in the plaster-and-marble nook for turning coffins in the curve of stairwell in the nineteenth-century town house. She was a jail in the shadow of which boys frolicked. Everything which had delighted him, all this buying and building, that it was all trifling and wasted, for the Major knew—

  Two visitors had come. Croft, of course, who’d stayed a week in her basement room and visited the hospital every day, plaguing her with small packages of inedible curative food, ferrying in Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volumes of the Powell, drawing glares from the furious Jamaicans for rinsing her bedpan in the bathroom and for his earnest, pointless questions regarding her care. Then, at her request, he’d taken the orange cat with him to Indiana. She wished the orange cat luck. It might perhaps serve as conscience for the rural commune, its missing moral center. Croft had shaven or grown a beard—Isabel couldn’t focus except on her own irritation, centering somewhere around his mouth. Croft would get the house. He’d sell it, she didn’t want to conjecture to whom. Isabel found she couldn’t read the Powell now, couldn’t make it work, couldn’t operate the sentences. She watched The Gong Show instead. There was an act, a comic with a paper bag on his head, whom she rather liked: Take that, Anthony Powell!

  Isabel’s second visitor, Rachel Ebdus, had also brought a book, which Isabel regarded in astonishment: Woman on the Edge of Time. Really, imagine calling oneself “Marge Piercy”! Isabel had smiled and turned her wrist as she was learning to do—that small slackening, that relinquishing, rehearsal for the deeper operation—turned her wrist and let the book drop to the floor, then whispered more faintly than was required that Rachel should put it on the bedside table. She enjoyed playing at dying while she was dying. You fool, she’d wanted to say, I don’t read women authors.

  Rachel Ebdus had been crying. She and her recluse filmmaker were surely fighting again. The woman had something she wanted to say but Isabel Vendle decided to invoke the petty majesty of the near-dead and prevent her saying it. It’s enough that you’ll inherit my Dean Street, beatnik child. Don’t come here to inter your woes in my dying heart.

  Rachel Ebdus was talking but it was as distant to Isabel Vendle as footprints on the moon.<
br />
  “I might go,” she heard the young woman say.

  “Yes,” Isabel said. “That’s best. Go.” If Rachel Ebdus were on television singing this song of woe Isabel would have long since “gonged” her— the Major knew that now he had to plan how to enter an unknown country, one where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson —

  Then she was alone, Rachel Ebdus discouraged, Croft scooted back to Indiana. Boerum Hill was what it was—partial, recalcitrant, corrupt—and whatever it would next become it could manage without Isabel Vendle’s help. Let it be carved up, let it be forgotten, let it be forgiven. We must be of the sun, she thought, irritated at herself for continuing to quote, so late in the game, there wasn’t anything here but the sun in the first place, the earth came out of the sun, we came out of the earth —in her last dream Simon Boerum, the old drunk, came to her and rowed her to the shore of Vendle’s Hard, both oars secure in his hand, so whatever we are, we must come from the sun —

  Gong!

  Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn’t read still couldn’t, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year plan, the going concern. You couldn’t be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You’d retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D–enriched chocolate milk.

  Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn’t be made to agree it was incredible.