The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Though certain to resume his galactic harangue before long, Perry Kandel paused now to savor his own last rhetorical flourish like he was sucking on an invisible cigar. Then, price extracted—Abraham Ebdus was more than usually conscious this day that every single thing in the world had its price—his old teacher scribbled a name and a phone number on the pink duplicate copy of a student evaluation form and pushed it across the desk.

  chapter 6

  Rabbit-furred parka hood laced tight around his neck, tunnel vision further reduced by his bowed head, the boy’s narrowed view consists only of his own ribbed Converse sneaker toes shooting forward in alternation through a fur-lined oval window of rushing-past pavement. He walks this way along Atlantic Avenue to Flatbush and Fourth, hands plunged in pockets, winter giving a certain minimal cover, a chance to mask hands, face, all whiteness. Crossing Fourth he’s forced to lift the furred viewfinder, turn it right and left, searching for the right moment to cross the lanes of heavy traffic to the newsstand on the triangular island. Seen through the windshields of the steaming cars at the red light on Fourth, or through the dusty windows of the Doray Tavern or the Triangle Pawn Shop, the boy might resemble a mole or rat on two legs, gray hood tugged into a shape that resembles a darting, questing nose, one which sniffs air for danger.

  The mole-figure now scurries across the intersection to the shelter of the newsstand. There he looks up again, turns the nose anxiously full circle, perhaps suspecting he’s been followed. Finally, satisfied, the mole crouches, under the indifferent eyes of the newsstand’s proprietor, a bearded Arab who warms his hands over the portable heater wedged at his feet in the narrow cubicle lined with People, Diario, The Amsterdam News. The mole kneels, peels up his pants leg, wrinkles down his orange-striped tube sock. Tucked moistly against his ankle is a paper dollar and three twenty-five-cent coins. It’s Tuesday. The mole-boy pushes the dollar and one of the quarters forward on the smooth-worn wooden lip of the newsstand, then gently works the freshly arrived comic books out of the cold metal racks. One each of The Avengers #138 and Marvel Team-Up #43, featuring Spider-Man and Doctor Doom, and three copies of the debut issue of Omega the Unknown, an instant collector’s item, as promised by months of buildup in the “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins” columns in other titles. The proprietor glances, nods glazed consent. The mole-boy’s parka is opened for a dangerous instant, the comics slid ever so carefully into the waistline of his pants. The mole-boy closes his coat, relaxes his arms, tests to see that he’s walking normally, that the presence of the comics is concealed, but also that the precious #1s are uncrumpled. The remaining two quarters are now shifted to the coat pocket. They’re to travel with him, gripped in a clenched, sweaty fist, for offering up at the first opportunity, the slightest confrontation. Mugging money. Walk these streets with pockets empty, you’re an idiot, asking for it.

  This creature of pure fear waddles home, tiny steps to be sure the comics don’t slip.

  Once indoors the mole-boy sheds his protective cover. The Avengers and Team-Up are put aside, afterthoughts. Two copies of Omega the Unknown are tucked in sober plastic, the plastic is taped shut, the sealed bags moved to a high shelf, archived. The last copy, that’s for reading.

  The heralded Omega? He turns out to be a mute superhero from another planet, pretty much Black Bolt mated with Superman, if you allowed the comparison. The comic is weird, worse than unsatisfying. Omega, it turns out, isn’t the main point of the thing. The majority of pages are given over to another character, a twelve-year-old kid with an unexplained psychic connection to Omega, a bullied, orphaned kid who’s going to a public junior high in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Hey, maybe even the geniuses up at Marvel Comics knew you were in hell. Didn’t matter, didn’t help, because you weren’t allowed to know it yourself, not really. There wasn’t any connection between you and the poor, helpless kid in Omega the Unknown, not that you could permit yourself to see.

  That kid? He just didn’t have any street smarts.

  Sixth grade. The year of the headlock, the year of the yoke, Dylan’s heat-flushed cheeks wedged into one or another black kid’s elbow, book bag skidding to the gutter, pockets rapidly, easily frisked for lunch money or a bus pass. On Hoyt Street, on Bergen, on Wyckoff if he was stupid enough to walk on Wyckoff. On Dean Street, even, one block from home, before the dead eyes of the brownstones, in the shadow of the humming, implacable hospital. Adults, teachers, they were as remote as Manhattan was to Brooklyn, blind indifferent towers. Dylan, he was a bug on a grid of slate, white boy walking.

  “Yoke him, man,” they’d say, exhorting. He was the object, the occasion, it was irrelevant what he overheard. “Yoke the white boy. Do it, nigger.”

  He might be yoked low, bent over, hugged to someone’s hip then spun on release like a human top, legs buckling, crossing at the ankles. Or from behind, never sure by whom once the headlock popped loose and three or four guys stood around, witnesses with hard eyes, shaking their heads at the sheer dumb luck of being white. It was routine as laughter. Yoking erupted spontaneously, a joke of fear, a piece of kidding.

  He was dismissed from it as from an episode of light street theater. “Nobody hurt you, man. It ain’t for real. You know we was just fooling with you, right?” They’d spring away, leave him tottering, hyperventilating, while they high-fived, more like amazed spectators than perpetrators. If Dylan choked or whined they were perplexed and slightly disappointed at the white boy’s too-ready hysteria. Dylan didn’t quite get it, hadn’t learned his role. On those occasions they’d pick up his books or hat and press them on him, tuck him back together. A ghost of fondness lived in a headlock’s shadow. Yoker and yokee had forged a funny compact.

  You regularly promised your enemies that what you did together had no name.

  Dylan leaked saliva, tears. On a cold day a nostril path of snot. Once, pee. He’d bite his tongue and taste the seepage, the tang of humiliation swallowed back. They made faces, rolled eyes. Dylan was hopeless, stained with shame. They’d try to overlook it.

  “Boy bleeds you touch him, dang.”

  “Nah, man, he all right. Let him alone, man.”

  “You ain’t gonna say nothin’, right? Cuz you know we just messin’ around. We wouldn’t never do nothin’ to you, man.”

  He’d nod, collect himself, not open his mouth. Wait to be congratulated for gulping back a clog of tears, for exhibiting silence.

  “See? You pretty cool, for a white boy. Get outta here now.”

  White boy was his name. He’d grown into it, crossed a line, become visible. He shined like free money. The price of the name was whatever was in his pockets at the time, fifty cents or a dollar.

  “White boy, lemme talk to you for a minute.” Head tipped sideways, too lazy to take hands from pockets to summon him. One black kid, two, three. One near a bunch, maybe, you couldn’t say who was with who. Eyes rolled, laughing. The whole event a quotation of itself, a little boring, nearly an indignity to perform.

  If he ignored it, tried to keep walking: “Yo, white boy ! I’m talking to you, man.”

  “What’s the matter, you can’t hear ?”

  No. Yes.

  “You don’t like me, man?”

  Helpless.

  The fact of it: he’d cross the street to have his pockets emptied. The outcome was obvious anyway. He’d cross magnetized in disgrace, under the sway of an implicit yoking, so no one was forced to say See now I got to fuck you up, cuz you don’t listen, man. It was a dance, steps traced in yokes gone by. Call me white boy and I’ll hand you a dollar spontaneously, I’m good at this now.

  “Just come here for a minute, man, I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you gotta be afraid for? Dang, man. You think I’m gonna hurt you?”

  No. Yes.

  The logic was insane, except as a polyrhythm of fear and reassurance, a seduction. “What you afraid of? You a racist, man?”

  Me?

  We yoke you for thinking that we might: in your eyes we see that you co
me pre-yoked.

  Your fear makes it our duty to prove you right.

  He was caged on street corners, stranded anywhere. A pair of kids made a human jail, a box of disaster waiting on the innocent sunlit pavement, as though he’d climbed into the legendary abandoned refrigerator.

  Two voices made paradoxical, unanswerable music. Their performance for one another’s sakes, not his. The pleasure was in counterpoint, no place for a third voice.

  “Who you looking for? Ain’t nobody gonna help you, man.”

  “Nah, man, chill out. This white boy’s all right, he’s cool. You don’t got to fuck with him.”

  “Fuck he starin’ at me for, then? Yo, man, you a racist motherfucker? I might have to fuck up your stupid ass, just for that.”

  “Nah, man, shut up, he’s cool. You cool, right man? Hey, you got a dollar you could loan me?”

  The distillation, the question at the core of the puzzle, asked a million times, a million ways:

  “What you lookin’ at?”

  “Fuck you lookin’ at, man?”

  “Don’t look at me, white boy. I’ll slap you, motherfucker.”

  Here was what Robert Woolfolk had prepared him for. He’d awarded Dylan the gift of his own shame, his mummy’s silence, for use on a daily basis. Each encounter bore Robert’s signature—glancing pain and tilted logic, interrogations spinning nowhere. Ritual assurance that nothing had actually happened. And the guilt of Dylan’s whiteness excusing everything, covering it all.

  What

  the

  fuck

  am

  I

  looking

  at?

  If mole-boy ever lifted his darty eyes from the pavement he might have been casting around for a grownup, or maybe some older kid he knew, someone to bail him out. Mingus Rude, say, not that he was clear he’d want Mingus to see him this way, cowering at the prospect of a yoke, white boy with cheeks hate-red. Hey, I’m not racist, my best friend is black! This wasn’t halfway sayable. Nobody had ever said who was whose best friend. Mingus Rude likely had a million of them, seventh graders, black, white, who knew. And the mole-boy could have said black aloud about as easily as Fucking looking at motherfucking YOU, man! Anyway, Mingus Rude was nowhere near. The seventh and eighth graders were housed in the main building on Court Street, while Dylan was alone in the annex, one block and a million years, a million terrified footsteps, and one million-dollar kid away.

  Abraham Ebdus handled the stack of postcards just as he had the slices of burned toast, loosely, nearly dropping them, and frowning as though they had ruined something or were ruined themselves. He stared at his fingers after he’d scattered them on the breakfast table. Perhaps the postcards had left a scent or a smudge of something on his fingertips. Maybe they’d be improved by being scraped clean, or smeared with butter and orange jelly. Really they wanted to be tossed out. He let the kid have them instead.

  “Someone you know in Indiana?”

  The boy had come to breakfast with his backpack on, running late, as always. They were like old men at the YMCA, the two of them waking to their two alarm clocks in their two bedrooms and meeting for breakfast. Dylan’s a clock radio tuned to an all-news station which leaked through Abraham’s wall a blaring theme of trumpets and teletype sound effects, a voice boasting “The newswatch never stops,” like being driven out of sleep by a newsreel headache. The kid lived in an anxious world. His nervous system seemed tuned like a robot’s. Now he edged up to the table with the backpack humped up onto the back of his chair and blinked at the postcards while he gulped orange juice.

  “The first one came a month ago,” said Abraham. “The one with the crab.”

  Abraham Ebdus saw the kid needed new shoes. Dylan crushed his shoe backs by cramming into them with the laces tied, and carved away the inner rim of the heels with his pigeon-toed walk which corrective soles left uncorrected. He wanted to wear sneakers every day, certain sneakers which every kid desired. He’d spoken angrily and Abraham had understood that at stake was less status than a certain bottom line of humiliation, the survival of the kid’s willingness to even keep braving school every day. He’d bought him the sneakers but still insisted on the brown corrective shoes which looked like 1950s boaters. Sneakers two days out of five was the rule.

  The boy fingered the postcards but didn’t comment. “Toast is burned,” he said instead, head ducked down. He turned the postcard with the picture of the crab over twice, reading the lines, then scowling again at the Technicolor-hued photograph of the red crab on tan sand. His glasses slipped downward and he shoved them back quickly with his thumb, an occult gesture performed with a fugitive’s deftness. The kid was a hider.

  “Give me your glasses,” said Abraham.

  Dylan didn’t speak, just handed them over. Abraham fished out of a kitchen drawer a tiny screwdriver and cinched the hinge screws on the kid’s plastic frames. The glasses were shit, made of shit, part of the contemporary ocean of plastic. Abraham frowned at them and did what he could, tightened the screws, doing his miniaturist’s work. This was the level at which things could be improved. He wished now he’d taken the strange, inadequate postcards to his studio and altered them, forged the typist’s Courier font with his delicate brushes, fixed the stupid, enigmatic words to make them mean something more than they did, repainted the fire-engine-red crabshell a natural green and brown. As though crabs were bright red before you cooked them, idiots.

  Abraham Ebdus had studied the crab postcard for an hour the day it arrived, five weeks ago, in fact. Dylan’s name was typed in full on the back, the address was typed, the message too, all with a manual typewriter that had a misaligned ribbon which ornamented each of the wobbly-struck letters with a faint under-halo of red. Close inspection revealed too a miniature trail of oily gear marks made by the grinding of the postcard along the typewriter barrel’s right edge. The postage stamp was a reproduction of LOVE by Robert Indiana—that charlatan—and the message, which included no capitals or punctuation, read:

  this crab runs sideways west

  out of the pot

  but not out of potluck

  pacific ocean mermaid dreams

  be good d and you’ll see one

  Unsigned. Postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, which to Abraham could hardly mean less. Three more postcards came in the following weeks. The second showed the same Indiana postmark, followed by two boasting an erratic trail west, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Phoenix, Arizona. All stamped with LOVE and all equally gnomic, only now the typist had given attribution, still in type, at the foot of the flighty poems, capitalized to show it was the author’s name: Running Crab. Abraham Ebdus had read Running Crab’s subsequent messages with a fury that blurred the dopey words so they swam in his vision. Anyhow, they weren’t addressed to him.

  Now he again asked his son, “Got a friend in Indiana?” He was fishing, couldn’t help himself.

  Dylan didn’t reply, just scooped the postcards together like a deck of cards and shoved them into his backpack without reading them. Saving them for later. He seemed quite unsurprised.

  “I should have given them to you when they came,” said Abraham. “I will from now on. If more come.”

  Dylan stared up at him for an instant, adjusting the placement of his tightened frames on his nose.

  “I already got two,” Dylan said. “They came on Saturday.”

  Now Abraham was silenced.

  Outside, at the bottom step of his stoop, the boy looked back to be sure Abraham wasn’t watching through the parlor window, then slung his knapsack off his shoulders and unsnapped the top. Inside were his sneakers, Pro Ked 69ers in navy blue canvas, with the red-and-blue rubber stripes on the sole as thick and satisfying badges of legitimacy. Under the prodding of a fingernail the rubber stripes had the chewy, resistant texture of a fresh spaldeen. Today nobody would hound him singing Rejects, they make your feet feel fine, rejects, they cost a dollar ninety-nine, because these sneakers indisputably weren’t rejects. Few t
hings were as clear. While the knapsack was open the boy stashed his glasses, pushing them into the corner beside the six Running Crab postcards, the two he’d retrieved from the mail himself, the four new ones, three unread, which he’d study later. His interest in the postcards was clinical. The missives from Running Crab were amusing but had nothing to do with his life, like a dated and essentially forgettable television show you watched a lot anyway, but disdainfully, priding yourself on how seldom you laughed or even cracked a smile, Gilligan’s Island or Mister Ed.

  He changed his brown corrective shoes for the Pro Keds, but the shoes didn’t go in the knapsack. They didn’t go anywhere near school, not anymore. The shoes had a place under Rachel Ebdus’s overgrown forsythia plot in the yard to the left of the stoop, a cranny the boy had scooped out where they could nest with the earth and the bugs and the twigs until the boy came home from school and retrieved them. The shoes were an artifact from the fitful past, fossil shoes, and they belonged in the ground. Everyone knew to call them roachstompers because they associated them, properly, with their ancient cousins. That their survival into the present was uncanny didn’t make it any less embarrassing. The shoes ought to adapt, grow wings and disguise themselves as present-day birds, like the dinosaurs had. Or return to the ocean, become turtles. Until they burrowed back into the past where they belonged they could live in the earth, nestled in the cool forsythia roots which would never again be thinned or trimmed, and there they would be denied the sunlight which embarrassed them. It was for their own good. If Running Crab sent a postcard with a return address maybe he’d send her the shoes in the mail. Crab and shoes could run together, could scuttle into the sea. Dylan, he’d stick with Pro Keds.

  Near the finish of that desultory sixth-grade spring they found each other again, like it was the most normal thing in the world, like they hadn’t missed half a year of afternoons. Mingus wore a military-green jacket though it was too warm for a jacket, and the jacket clanked, full of some metallic something which had been pushed through torn pockets to nestle in the lining. The jacket’s back panel bore Mingus’s tag, DOSE , elaborately surrounded by asterisklike stars and swooping punctuation. All went unremarked. Dylan pushed his schoolbag just inside Mingus’s basement door and they slouched their way together down Dean Street, the block which had become so useless now, no skully, no ball games, any kid you could think of off in some cluster or gang, like survivalist cells. Just Marilla and La-La, but they didn’t even seem to recognize you now as they sang to each other I’m eightee-een with a bullet, got my finger on the trigger, I’m gonna pull it, yeah —