The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Chinese kids wouldn’t go to the bathroom all day, they lived that much in their own world.

  At home, Rachel Ebdus’s telephone was ringing unanswered.

  You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind. Through the Cyclone fence someone had brushed the word FLAMBOYAN in white paint on the stone wall, along with a square box for a strike zone.

  Bruce Lee was famous now that he was dead.

  A game of tap-it-in took place above the ground, in moments. Between jumps you weren’t playing. You were inert, copping an attitude.

  Black girls had a language of partial words, chants harder to learn than anything in class. There was a general noise at the edges you’d begun to detect, akin to indecipherable ballpoint desktop-gougings. A scribbled voice.

  The first few times someone said Hey, white boy it sounded like a mistake. You had to be guided into the new relation by the girls, the boys were actually a little shy about it.

  Wrong sneakers, wrong shoes, wrong length of pants. Highwaters.

  Where’s the flood?

  What you laughin’ at, fool?

  Dang. Boy’s laughin’ at his own self.

  From I.S. 293 or from nowhere, from the projects, older kids bunched at the school entrances and in corners of the yard. Previous fifth graders had been a layer between. Now you were the layer. Robert Woolfolk was among one of those regular bunches, the precocious paper-bag drinkers. Even standing in one place Robert Woolfolk moved like a sprained knee, like he was forever angling a too-small bike around the corner of Nevins. He flashed a smile like a torn photograph, his voice crept around corners in the air. Dylan Ebdus saw in Robert Woolfolk’s eyes that same scribbled quality.

  Red Hook, Fort Greene, Atlantic Terminals.

  You built up associations, which would pass for understanding. Nobody was explaining anything. Fifth grade was an abstract art, painted one frame at a time.

  Dylan could still hear the telephone ring from the kitchen while he sat on his stoop, waiting, watching, afternoons sliding to twilight, air chilling so the bodega sitters left their milk crates, shaking their heads, pinching their cold noses, leaving Old Ramirez alone. Dylan and Ramirez were paired in their two doorways, keeping watch, ignoring each other. Dylan watched the traffic trickle down Nevins, watched the mothers walking kindergartners home from the YWCA, counted the buses which drifted like humming loaves to the stoplight, waited, drifted on. Henry’s yard was empty, Marilla’s yard was empty, somebody saw a rat in the yard of the abandoned house. Bruce Lee and Isabel Vendle were dead and Nixon was strolling on a beach. Nobody moved, nobody played, strange kids walked the block in groups. It was a season of vanishing, of a silence like raw stupidity, like the unbearable ticking silence of a teacher expecting an answer from a kid everyone knew couldn’t even say his own name right.

  Let Abraham answer the phone, if he could even hear it. Let Abraham say she’s not here.

  Most days Dylan waited alone until Abraham called him in for dinner. Mingus Rude had other places to go, sixth-grader places, I.S. 293 places—other friends, Dylan guessed, then kept his own guessing hidden from himself. One or two afternoons a week Mingus would lope down the block and raise his hand. His coat was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, not the shiny plastic-stuffed bubblecoats every other kid wore. Mingus Rude carried his notebook and textbooks loose under his arm, no bag, and he’d clatter them on the stoop carelessly, expressing something less than utter disdain and more than total mastery.

  The comic books Mingus Rude treated as a presence delicately alive, some piece of still-beating flesh he and Dylan might be capable of healing by their absolute fixity of attention, by their reverence. The overlapping storylines were a field of expertise, skully again, all fine print and ritual. Dylan was really horrified to learn he’d let so much time slip past, so much essential cultural history. Forget what you thought you knew. The Silver Surfer, for example, was a situation you couldn’t really understand if you came in too late. Mingus only shook his head. You didn’t want to try to explain something so tragic and mystical.

  New comics arrived at newsstands on Tuesdays. Mingus Rude would have an armload, bought or stolen, Dylan didn’t ask. Some were bimonthly, some monthly, you learned by reading the letters page, you built up anticipation for special issues, too, oversized Annuals and one-time special events like the Avengers-Defenders Wars or Origins. In Origins you learned how superheroes got started, the answer generally being: radiation. In the Annuals and Wars you satisfied, at least provisionally, questions of who could take who. Hulk and Iron Man would face-off for a page or two, always vowing to settle it for good another time.

  Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn’t funny in the least. That’s why Spider-Man was so depressed all the time.

  Captain Marvel wasn’t Shazam, it was confusing. He’d been revived to assert a copyright on the name, and nobody could say whether he really fit into the Marvel Universe all that well. DC Comics, Marvel Comics’ antithesis, presented a laughable, flattened reality—Superman and Batman were jokes, ruined by television.

  In truth, Superman in his Fortress of Solitude reminded you all too much of Abraham in his high studio, brooding over nothing.

  Swamp Thing was a rip-off of Man-Thing, or vice versa.

  An uneasiness hung over certain titles. Different artists drew the same characters different ways—you could hurt your eyes trying to account for it, to grant continuity to these hobbled stories. Weaker superheroes were propped up with guest appearances by Spider-Man or the Hulk, confusing chronology terribly. An Einstein could lose his mind trying to explain how the Fantastic Four had helped the Inhumans fight the Mole Men when by clear testimony of their own magazine they were trapped in the Negative Zone the whole time.

  The Incredible Hulk, if you followed him closely over time, lost the use of pronouns.

  Two afternoons a week, sitting in the dimming light on Dylan’s stoop, never discussing fifth or sixth grade, stuff too basic and mysterious to mention. Instead just paging through, shoulders hunched to protect the flimsy covers from the wind, puzzling out the last dram, the last square inch of information, the credits, the letters page, the copyright, the Sea-Monkeys ads, the insult that made a man out of Mac. Then, just when you thought you were alone, Dean Street came back to life, Mingus Rude knowing everyone, saying Yo to a million different kids coming out of Ramirez’s store with a Yoo-Hoo or a Pixy Stix, to Alberto fetching Schlitz and Marlboros for his older brother and his older brother’s girlfriend. The block an island of time, school a million miles away, mothers calling kids inside, the bus lit inside now, fat ladies coming home from offices at the Board of Education on Livingston Street, their weary shapes like black teeth inside the glowing mouth of the bus, Marilla strolling by a million times singing It’s true, hah, sometimes you rilly do abuse me, you get me in a crowd of high-class pee-pul, then you act real rude to me, the light fading anxiously, streetlights buzzing as they lit, their arched poles decorated with boomeranged-up sneakers, and Mingus Rude saying, one dying afternoon, eyes never ungluing from a panel in Marvel’s Greatest Comics in which Mr. Fantastic had balled himself into an orb the size of a baseball, his tiny face including signature gray temple hair still visible in incredible wrinkled detail, in order to be shot from a bazooka into the vulnerable mouth of an otherwise impervious fifty-foot-tall robot named Toomazooma, the Living Totem, “Your moms is still gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dang, man. That’s fucked up.”

  chapter 5

  After five weeks he was ready to sell the nudes. They nagged at his mind, they spoke to each other from opposite walls in distorted whispers, they reflected him back to himself like fun-house mirrors, they, along with the ringing telephone, the abandoned kitchen counter, the stale unemptied ashtrays, made the parlor floor of the brownstone seem a skull lacking a brain, an empty skull decorated with memories, d�
�jà vu. She wasn’t coming back, and his knowledge of it throbbed from the canvases like heat traces.

  Erlan Hagopian, an Armenian collector who lived on the Upper East Side, had looked at the paintings two years before. He’d asked to see them after one had been hung in a group show on Prince Street, at Abraham Ebdus’s old teacher’s request—a request Abraham should have refused, a vanity, a mistake. Hagopian and the Prince Street dealer had come around to Dean Street wanting to see the paintings and also wanting to see the studio. Abraham had refused them that, protecting the film, protecting his secret work, and inadvertently extending the confusion that the nudes were recent, or that his work on canvas continued. It didn’t. His larger brushes rotted, not even properly cleaned the last time he’d touched them. That day Erlan Hagopian had made a production of asking the price of the whole roomful, of wanting to be told the number which would need to be written on a check to rob the parlor of its fleshy insulation in one grand gesture. Confident, surely, that it would be denied—the Armenian had read Abraham Ebdus’s diffidence at least that well. Perhaps not so well, though, that he’d expected what he got: being refused even one of the paintings. Abraham Ebdus’s reward was the sorry, grumbling shake of the Prince Street dealer’s sunglass-bearing, golden-maned head. That look was worth any number on a check.

  Now, two years later, Ebdus phoned Hagopian directly, knowing that to circumvent the dealer—a secret that wouldn’t keep for a so-called New York minute if Hagopian actually purchased any art—was to burn a bridge to his old career, a bridge to SoHo, to Manhattan. Abraham Ebdus would be perfectly glad if the bridge was gone. He’d turned his back on the city which lay across that river and was stalking off in the opposite direction, into a desert of his own making, a desert of celluloid.

  Erlan Hagopian, for his own purring reasons, didn’t hesitate. He seemed to recognize the logic of Abraham Ebdus’s capitulation: Having asked you to set your price for a roomful of paintings you refuse to sell me even one—and in that overcompensating gesture, that childish underestimation of money’s force, is the seed of the moment to come, when you will inevitably come begging to sell me the roomful. Naturally.

  Perhaps Erlan Hagopian had always wanted to buy a whole roomful of nudes, and now would be able to say he had. Perhaps he bought roomfuls of nudes every week. Perhaps he’d intuited the death of Abraham’s career in painting and knew he was collecting a luminous mass tombstone, perhaps Rachel Ebdus was now his mistress, captive in luxury in a Park Avenue penthouse, and the paintings were only the seal on an invisible deal Abraham Ebdus couldn’t sense he was making. Anyway, Erlan Hagopian didn’t ask to see the paintings a second time. He sent a check, and a truck.

  Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days. There was no single story: for all he knew Mingus might be off fighting the Mole Men at the I. S. 293 annex, where sixth graders went, while Dylan, in fifth grade, was still trapped in the Negative Zone—it didn’t matter, didn’t contradict, they weren’t the Fantastic Four, after all, just a couple of kids. By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they’d left off, pool what they still had in common. What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end.

  In between anything could happen and was beginning to. One example: the day Robert Woolfolk effortlessly corralled Dylan in the schoolyard, by gesturing with his slanted shoulders and saying, “Yo, Dylan, man, let me see you for a minute.” See you, like Dylan himself was now a bottle of Yoo-Hoo to be gulped or a bicycle to steer around the block forever. Dylan had stepped once, twice in Robert Woolfolk’s direction, not understanding how to refuse, and found himself alone with him.

  Robert said, sleepily, “I saw them take yo mama outside the house naked.”

  Dylan said, “What?”

  “In the truck. They wrapped her all in blankets but they fell off. I saw her hanging out all over the street like a ho.”

  Dylan calculated distances between the spot where they stood and the four exits from the schoolyard, despairing at the emptiness of a November afternoon that had succumbed to the Woolfolk Principle of human desertion. “That wasn’t my mother,” was what came out of his mouth. It wasn’t half an answer to Robert’s craziness.

  “Came out of your house, man, naked like a witch. Don’t lie. They put her in a police truck and took her away.”

  Now Dylan was baffled. Had Robert Woolfolk seen something Dylan hadn’t? He couldn’t really be confusing paintings with a person, art handlers with police.

  At the same time a glow of fear rose in him, knowing that however muddled, Robert Woolfolk grasped that Rachel was no longer around to kick his ass.

  Robert went on, in a reasonable tone of commiseration. “Threw her in jail, I expeck. Locked her up for being too motherfuckin’ loud and crazy.”

  “She wasn’t naked,” Dylan defended, laps behind. “Those were paintings.”

  “She weren’t wearing no paintings when I saw her. She was hanging out all over the street for anyone to see. Ask somebody if you think I’m a lion.”

  “A liar?” In dizziness Dylan wanted to lead Robert Woolfolk back to his home, to show him the trails of dust and shadows of faded housepaint on the parlor walls marking where the nudes had hung, missing pictures of a missing woman, ghosts of ghosts.

  “Don’t call me no fuckin’ lion, man. I’ll fuck up your white ass before I’m done. Show me your hand.”

  “What?”

  “Your hand. Right here. Let me show you something.” Robert encircled Dylan’s wrist with his long fingers and turned it downward—Dylan watching in fascination as though from a vast distance—then curled it in one sharp motion toward Dylan’s shoulder blade, so Dylan doubled at the waist, following the line of force. Dylan’s knapsack tumbled over his head, notebook pages spilling to the concrete in view between his knees. His face flooded with blood and breath.

  “See, don’t let nobody get you like that,” said Robert. “You do anything they want, they get you arm twisted back. I’m just telling you for your own good. Pick up your shit and clear out of here now.”

  None of this was tellable. As they sat in the winter-squeezed light of Mingus Rude’s backyard window, Barrett Rude Junior upstairs, strains of the Average White Band and his slippered footfalls trickling through the hardwood, Dylan and Mingus downstairs with their two heads bent together, leafing through the new issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Warlock, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus whether he’d also seen the art handlers loading their truck or whether he’d instead somehow witnessed Robert Woolfolk’s imaginary police. It was outside speech. To begin with, Rachel’s disappearance didn’t want to be given a name, a form to etch it in Dean Street history. And if Mingus had seen that parade of fleshy canvases, Dylan didn’t want to know. Too, he couldn’t describe how the balance of terror Rachel had struck in Robert Woolfolk was now tipped, because he felt a queasy instinct that Mingus and Robert should be kept ignorant of each other. If they were destined to meet Dylan didn’t want to be the one who introduced them, and if they were already familiar it was another thing Dylan was in no hurry to learn. Finally, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus Rude if black people called liars lions because Mingus Rude was black. Sort of.

  So silence and comic-book word balloons and the bass thump of the stereo upstairs.

  One December afternoon Mingus tossed down his loose-leaf binder, bowed cardboard pressed with blue fabric, fraying at the corners, and Dylan saw that on every surface surrounding Mingus’s old Philadelphia Flyers sticker the binder was laced with ballpoint scrawlings, lines dug in repetition like Spirograph ovals, gestures toward some perfect, elusive form. Here was the scribble from schoolyard walls, now carried home to Dean
Street and plopped on Dylan’s stoop.

  “That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped—faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound-effect panel.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”

  It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag. Dylan might have one himself any day now. Further explanations were or weren’t coming. The narrowed hours of winter light were a form of patience themselves, a stoic reply to no question. Rachel had vacated a certain hysteria from the house, replaced it with the telephone and assorted other ringing tones. A day had a hum like a seashell. Dylan watched television, watched the mails, watched his father trudge upstairs to his studio. He listened to his mother’s abandoned records at low volume, Carly Simon, Miriam Makeba, Delaney & Bonnie. From the barred window of his second-floor classroom he watched janitors trudge through a thin carpet of snow to Dumpsters, which were covered with the newly visible scribble. Dylan had begun to pick out names, layers in the mess. Most things had happened some time before Dylan came along, that’s why taking them for granted was so crucial. You could dial up any example in reruns, Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Mod Squad. All was exemplary of daily life, the undertow of the normal.

  Things occurred in one another’s company that Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude might never discuss. They watched the Super Bowl in Mingus Rude’s parlor, first sealing a five-dollar bet in whispers in the basement room, Mingus taking the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dylan, on helmet aesthetics, the Minnesota Vikings. Then they’d tiptoed upstairs, under the eye of the gold records. The parlor was rearranged, the water bed hidden, the couch and a tremendous Barcalounger arrayed around a mammoth color television. Barrett Rude Junior sat enthroned before the screen in blue satin pants and an unsashed silk robe, his thick arms fallen to either side, palms open, legs sprawled halfway to the television. Coils of black-and-white hair were like false starts, unfinished cursives on the flat brown page of his chest. He cinched his head halfway from the pregame show to consider Dylan, squinted through his granny glasses, his goatee warping wryly as he pursed immense lips.