The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Mole-boy ventures out in springtime unprotected. Takes his chances. He folds a dollar into sixteenths and works it into a slot on the inside of his belt buckle, arms himself with a double bluff: two quarters in his pocket, and another fifty cents he’s willing to cough up tucked into his sock. Whatever it takes. This operation is routine. In his front pocket, though, the scrabbling furtive creature has a stash he’s nervous about, his hands eager, prickly. His own El Marko, jet-black, seal unbroken. At Pearl Paint on Canal Street the Saturday before, on a run for art supplies, the mole-child had gathered it up with a sketch pad and a long tin box of colored pencils. Abraham Ebdus paid for the lot, no questions asked.

  It’s Saturday, not quite ten in the morning the fifth day of June. Sixth grade is nearly shed now, the I.S. 293 Annex a one-year carapace, like a gross bodily phase, a mistake. What’s the point of a one-year school? You couldn’t grow into any useful stature. Next year was what mattered now, always had been, if you’d only known. You were readying for seventh grade. The main building on Court Street, with Mingus Rude in the grade ahead. There you’d stand some chance. Maybe. Seventh grade: concentrate, bring it into being. Looking anywhere beyond that, to high school, the guilty muffled fantasy of girls, blond girls like the lost-not-forgotten Solvers, is likely unwise for a mole-creature looking to avoid getting yoked. Take it one step at a time, o creature of the depths.

  Meantime, prepare to enter Mingus’s ranks. Earn your stripes, locate your name. Saturday morning you could dare to hope the kids in the projects were all still in their Jockey underwear, five to a couch, watching Merrie Melodies on black-and-white screens. The stink of the solvent factory on Bergen is the only thing loud today, the Puerto Ricans not yet assembled in front of Ramirez’s store, the vacant bus floating like a chubby mote in new-summer light toward Third Avenue. A morning like this one might be a safe time to bring your name into being, throw it up on a wall. Nevertheless, mole-boy moves with nothing short of usual caution. Day, night, doesn’t matter. Who knows how he’ll explain if he’s cornered and forced to empty his pockets, show the El Marko. The thing’s a stolen passport, a charm he hasn’t earned the right to carry.

  Glancing behind, he moves up Nevins.

  On the block of Pacific Street between Nevins and Third a couple of side-by-side empty lots had been converted into what was called a vest-pocket park. Really just a dent in the block’s façade of brownstones, a square of ungreen public space, full of an oddly deep sandpit and some modernistic climbing furniture made of heavily lacquered wooden beams, plus the conventional slide and swings. The vest-pocket’s floor was black rubber matting in squares, joined by jigsaw-puzzle hinges, and strewn everywhere with broken glass and stubbed cigarettes and evaporated puddles of urine that marked the site’s true life. The slide and swings and the bolted-down garbage bins and the brick of the walls that made the vest-pocket’s three sides were thick-layered with tags in spray paint and marker. A kid was widely regarded as an idiot for setting foot in that sand even in sneakers, forget barefoot. That’s if you entered the Venus Flytrap of the park at all. Mole-boy regards it as a zone he sees the less of the better, and it takes courage for him to enter it now, though a quick glance confirms he’s alone.

  He fumbles the El Marko free of his pocket and looks for a clean spot.

  The last square of untagged surface in the vest-pocket is low on the underside of the slide, the angle awkward-to-impossible. Knees bent, he duckwalks into the slide’s shadow and uncaps. Smells the fresh reek of the black ink. He’s got a name ready, a secret with himself, practiced a thousand times the past two weeks, ballpoint on school desk, Sharpie marker on loose-leaf binder, bare fingertip in the air.

  But this isn’t going to happen today.

  Because today is the day the flying man falls from the roof.

  First a shadow flashing at the corner of the boy’s eyes as he crouches under the slide, an immense bird- or bat-like stretch of black against the brick wall. Flight, reversed. Then a collapsing thud, someone thrown, and the wheezing sigh, the exhale thrown from a body by force of impact. The long sigh resolving into a moan. The boy starts, grazing his head on the slide’s underside, drops the marker. Caged in the slide’s shadow, he wonders if he could somehow hide there from the whatever.

  Answer’s nope, he can’t.

  “Little white boy,” groans the voice. “Whatchoo doin’?”

  The flying man is huge, up close. He’s seated on the rubber matting and against the wall, a few feet away, knees up, two hands at his right ankle, rubbing. The skin of his knobby, flinty hands and at his ankle, at each of his ankles, bare above ratty red sneakers— rejects, in point of fact—is scaly, psoriatic, white tracing on alligator black. He’s dressed in jeans oiled gray with filth and a formerly white shirt, cuffs shredded, a button dangling by a thread. And over his shoulder, crumpled between his wide back and the brick wall, a bedsheet cape, knotted at the neck just like the kid in Where the Wild Things Are, only stained yellow. Unavoidably the boy thinks: pee -stained. And the flying man smells like pee, even worse than the park does.

  The flying man grumbles again, looks up even as he goes on rubbing his ankle. His jaw is stubbled and pitted, curls of white boiled in dark acne. His nose points sideways. And where the flying man’s eyes ought to be white they’re that same pee-stain color, as though he’s somehow urinated even into his own eyeballs.

  Dylan Ebdus doesn’t speak, he stares.

  The flying man nods at the fallen El Marko. “Scrawling up some nassyshit on the walls, I seen you.”

  “You fell down,” says Dylan Ebdus.

  “Nah, man, I flew down,” says the flying man. “Fucked up my motherfucking leg, though. Can’t land right no more.”

  “How—how can you fly?”

  “Hah. Ain’t ’cause of this fucking thing, that’s for damn sure.” The flying man pulls now at the sheet around his neck, sticks his blunt fingers in the knot and jerks it loose, surprisingly easily. He balls the soiled cape and tosses it to the side, into a pile of broken glass. “Tangle me up, hurt my leg, dang,” he mutters. “Got to be fallin’ all the time.”

  Dylan Ebdus takes a cautious step toward the uncapped El Marko where it lies on the rubber floor of the park.

  “Gohead, pick it up. I don’t give a shit ’bout no fucking graffiti, man. Least of my problems, shit.”

  Dylan grabs the marker, caps it, and puts it away. The flying man seems to be talking to himself now, anyway.

  “Hey, man, you got a dollar, man?”

  Dylan Ebdus stares again. The flying man shows his teeth, which are small and too spacious. His gum a flare of brown and pink.

  “You can’t talk, man? I axed if you got a dollar.”

  The mole-boy is almost relieved to shift to such familiar turf. On automatic, he digs in his pocket. Another part of him, though, still calculates trajectories, replays that flash and thud of descent a minute before. His eyes flicker to the rooftop, three stories high. From there to here ?

  Elsewhere this day’s unstarted. The park an empty bracket, no one walking Pacific Street’s sidewalk to confirm or triangulate any goings-on.

  The flying man reaches up and Dylan Ebdus hands him fifty cents, stepping into the aura of stink to do it. He steps quickly back.

  The flying man palms the quarters, turns a silver ring on his pinky finger, his eyes locked on Dylan’s. There’s a rime of white crusted in the fine lines of the flying man’s neck, as though he’s been beached, baked in evaporating salt.

  “I used to fly good,” says the flying man.

  “I’ve seen you,” says Dylan, nearly whispering, the knowledge appearing with the words.

  “Can’t no more,” says the flying man angrily, then licks his lips. “Muthafucking”—here he works to find a word—“air waves always got to be knocking me down.”

  “Air waves?”

  “Hah. Hah. I can’t stay in the air no more. That’s the problem, man.” The flying man suddenly spots the quarters
shining in his cracked palm, like shards of mirror sun-caught in a muddy curb. “That’s all you got, man? That’s all you got for me?”

  Dylan nods mutely, then undoes his belt and surrenders the tiny, wadded dollar, not unfolding it but dropping it like a Chiclet into the cup of the flying man’s vast fissured hand.

  “Hah. You really seen me flyin’?”

  The flying man lifts his chin to point at the distant rooftops above Pacific and Nevins, the roof of P.S. 38 and beyond, to the Wyckoff Houses. Seagulls wheel in the pale sky, strayed from Coney Island or Red Hook.

  Dylan Ebdus nods again, then flees the park.

  chapter 7

  Apostcard from Running Crab, postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, August 16, 1976. The front a black-and-white photograph of Henry Miller on the beach at Big Sur, naked apart from a loincloth so big it’s like a baby’s diaper, wrinkled chest sagging below caustic grin and sunburned brow. A statuesque, black-haired woman stands aloof behind him, in a bikini and a filmy wrap, ankles in surf, ignoring the camera.

  don’t let hank fool you d

  a brooklyn street kid never quits

  dreaming of stickball triples

  egg creams and the funnies

  in his mind he’s dick tracy

  she’s brenda starr

  not venus on the half shell

  love beachcomber crab

  He stared at the tickets so long his eyeball vibes might have scoured off the ink bearing that blind coon’s name and replaced it with his own. Some fool up at Artists and Repertory had sent him two tickets to see Ray motherfucking Charles at Radio City Music Hall, as though he was likely to sit pondering a mile of the spangled white pussy known as the Rockettes—from the goddamn balcony!—just to see that haughty jive-ass banging on a grand piano hollering “God Bless America.” Never wished to play Radio City, why would he be found in the balcony ?

  He’d propped his parlor windows open high. Outside, Dean Street moaned in an ailment of humidity. The heat was granular, undissolved. The sunlight on the strewn mirror blobby, swimmy. Nothing rippled the curtains, the air didn’t move. Just a steady distant Puerto Rican beat from the square in front of Ramirez’s store, might be the same song for the last two hours, the whole afternoon. Cars moved like jellyfish, barely distinguishable from their medium, a ripple where the tar met the air.

  Four black kids dancing like startled spiders in the flow of a wrenched-open hydrant on Nevins and Bergen.

  He tossed the tickets on the mirror, then carved out a line, taking care to point his toes outward, ten and two on the face of an imaginary clock. He’d recently developed a technique of widening his hips and knees and keeping his back arched as he leaned forward, so that breathing a line became more natural, the blow raining into his open lungs, flushing him through with cool air. Too many cats snorted while balled up, imbibing the drug ragefully, their bodies fistlike.

  It was like singing, a matter of what distant quadrants in your belly and chest you could find to offer up.

  Commitment on a deeper level.

  From the low angle he puzzled the tickets with his eyes, exploring how they lay twinned on the mirror, dark writing inaccessibly sandwiched in shadow between the two pairs, the real and the reflected. Maybe Crowell Desmond, his so-called manager, had engineered this affront. A widely unknown historical fact was that Ray Charles had personally bounced a reel of Subtle Distinctions’ demos when he was running Tangerine, saying, reputedly, Don’t come around here with this Motown-sounding doo-wop horseshit. But could Desmond, who’d crept onto the scene only a year ago, be savvy to that fact? Not likely. Anyway, Crowell Desmond lacked initiative for such a cryptic put-down.

  Barrett Rude Junior picked up a rolled dollar bill and drew a line clear into his lower gut, into his balls and dick. Felt the chill there shudder outward everywhere through his clammy, sweat-boiled carcass.

  Nigger, he thought. Nig- guh, major falling to minor, an interval of sevenths.

  Fugitive melodies lurked in the space between syllables, niggers themselves crouching in the dark.

  No, the bestowal of the Ray Charles tickets was A&R working on its own, twitches from a corporate body which had never walked, only groveled. The resemblance to sentient life purely accidental. Someone in the offices had the wholly asinine and improbable notion they’d sweet-talk him up to Montreal to record some discofied bullshit with the German producer of the Silver Convention, wanting to turn him into Johnnie Taylor, maybe, or the Miracles after Smokey split, soul men in mirror-studded spandex bodysuits singing for horny Valley of the Dingbat housewives.

  Move it up, move it down, move it in, move it out, Disco Lady! Then take me out behind the house and shoot my lame black ass.

  Nihhh- gahhh, like breathing.

  Could turn into a Curtis Mayfield falsetto thing, maybe.

  In the same cause the sycophantic flacks had one month earlier dragged to his doorstep a slick new four-track tape recorder with a note on cream-colored gold-embossed stationery reading Barry, never forget you wrote Bothered to get me off your back, I’m still on it, Ahmet. As if that white-goateed upper-management hipster had likely even noticed the tune until the Mantovani Strings version had floated into his private fur-lined elevator.

  Atlantic had ripped him off in his incarnation as the lead voice of the Servile Distinctions, siphoned royalties from his account like draining a pool. Then as final insult brought in Andre Deehorn and some no-name scab singers and built tracks around unfinished vocals, for release as a bogus final album— The Subtle Distinctions Love You More! —after he’d quit. Now they wheedled and cajoled for the chance to resume ripping him off as a solo act. Only heartfelt emotion they’d ever know, like hungry cousins ringing your phone: Come back and spread green on us again, brother! He’d stashed the four-track below, in Mingus’s apartment, its magnetic virginity intact. Now he turned the same way with the tickets, shouted down the stairwell.

  “Gus, man, get up here. Got something for you.”

  Mingus came upstairs in a T-shirt and his Jockey shorts, looking sleepy-eyed at one in the afternoon. He cocked his head at the drift of cocaine on the sun-mottled mirror, the smeary ghosts of inhaled lines that trailed out of it.

  Kid stared at the blow like he’d never seen it before.

  “What?” said Barrett Rude Junior. “You want to get high?” He waved his hand at the mirror from his big chair where he sat, felt the weight of his arm, a banner of flesh moving in the damp air.

  Nihhh-gahhh, nihh-gahh, got you-self an itchy tri-ggahhh fin-gahhh. Could be a theme song for some movie about a pimp. Maybe he ought to fish that four-track recorder upstairs, shock their minds with a new track, number-one hit single on the R&B charts, first time the word nigger ’s ever been on the radio. Go fuck yourself, Omlet!

  It seemed to take a thousand years for Mingus to quit staring and shake his head.

  Barrett Rude Junior just laughed. “Don’t tell me you ain’t hittin’ it when I’m not around. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Lay off.”

  “I know what’s wrong with you. You’re saying, Barry best get this cleaned up before Senior comes up here. Read your eyes, man.”

  “I didn’t say nothing.”

  “Whatever. I got these tickets for you if you want them. Brother Ray Charles, up at Ray- dee -oh City. Drinkin’ wine spo-de-o-dee, drinkin’ wine.”

  “You don’t want to go?”

  “Nah, not tonight. Why don’t you call up a friend, hop up there on the F train.”

  Mingus took the tickets. Barrett Rude Junior rubbed his nose and upper lip with his knuckle, waiting. Him and Mingus both fine-beaded in the day’s wet heat.

  “Ray Charles is the man, Gus. Big part of your cultural heritage right there, my man. You’ll be telling your kids you were there, Ne-ver fo-get the time I saw Bruth-a Ray.” He couldn’t say why he wanted the boy to go. “Plus they got some fine air-conditioning up there in that balcony, man. Go cool out with a friend, get out the heat. Ta
ke Dylan. Or that raisin-looking ghetto child you been bringing around, what’s his name? Robert. Radio City likely blow that boy’s mind.”

  The talk came out of him in one breath and was strangely taxing. He closed his eyes and when he opened them Mingus stood there still looking at the tickets as though Barrett hadn’t spoken.

  “You gonna go, or what?”

  “You got other plans?” asked Mingus.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” In truth, Barry had his eye on a double feature at the Duffield Theater up on Fulton Street, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings and Car Wash. Leverage his own ass out of the day’s heat, into some dark windowless auditorium with best-be-working air-conditioning. Just not to contemplate Ray Charles in a tuxedo. “You want the tickets?”

  Mingus shrugged. Scratching himself in his underwear, eyeballing his father, trying to figure the angle.

  “Take them, think it over, give Dylan a call.”

  “You don’t care if I sell them?”

  Barrett Rude Junior eyeballed his son in return. “Nah, man, I don’t care.” His disappointment was irrational, huge. “But once you’re all the way up there, why not check it out? It’s bread you want, I’ll give you bread, Gus.”

  His pushing only stoked Mingus’s own resistance, he saw now. If your old man doesn’t want to go see Ray Charles why should you want to go? Too much effort all around, this day especially. Brooklyn was a tropical place, faint marimba notes suspended in the yellow air, now a Mister Softee truck’s incessant, circular tune, rising and falling like an ambulance whine as it positioned itself on Bergen, Bond, Dean, Pacific, drawing sluggish kids like ants to a soda spill. Manhattan seemed a thousand miles away, another city.

  Barrett Rude Junior could have done with a soft-dipped cone himself come to think of it.

  Getting one was another whole story altogether.

  Didn’t see himself standing at no ice-cream truck.