The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  Guy looks dead if you ask me.

  How? Why’s it allowed? Isabel Vendle’s Boerum Hill was declared “The City’s Best-Kept Secret,” New York Magazine, September 12, 1971. Gentrification—say the word, nothing to be ashamed of, only what’s this alcoholic coma victim doing here in plain sight? How likely no one expresses concern or touches his shoulder to see if he still moves, still lives, how likely no one even calls the cops?

  Is it because he’s black?

  Maybe Atlantic Avenue between Nevins and Third isn’t quite Boerum Hill. Maybe it’s Gowanus or some other thing without a name. Anyway this gentrification is strange and slow and not at all as coherent as Isabel Vendle might have hoped. There’s a cluster of antique shops now on Atlantic between Hoyt and Bond, new families on Pacific and Dean, Bergen too. Not Wyckoff, Wyckoff’s too close to the projects, no point hoping. Then there’s the communes. Assuming no one stashes Patti Hearst in a Dean Street basement they’re harmless enough, an acceptable placeholder. Some eager beaver’s opened a French restaurant on Bergen and Hoyt, jumping the gun perhaps but worth a shot. Even State Street, so close to Schermerhorn and the House of Detention and the eye-agonizing blight of downtown Brooklyn, even State’s got a tender little boomlet of brownstone renovation.

  Yet it exists under a spell, a pall. The white families appear continuously these days, now too many to count, but collectively they’re still a dream, a projection conjured up by Isabel’s will. The renovators—that’s a politer word for them—they’re a set of ghosts from the future haunting this ghetto present. They’re a proposition, a sketch. Blink and they might be gone.

  Ghetto? Is that the name for it? Depends which block in this patchwork you have in mind. Rise up, the way the flying man no longer can. Look. Here Fourth Avenue’s a wide trench of light-industrial ruin, oil-stained auto-body shops and forlorn, graffitied warehouses, sidewalks marked with sprays of broken glass which trace the shape of nighttime incidents in front of Chinese take-out places, liquor stores, bodegas, all of them serving their customers through slots or sliding drawers in shields of Plexiglas. At the opposite end, Court Street’s an old Italian preserve, the side streets south of Carroll hushed in the grip of Mafia whispers, old ways enforced with baseball bats and slashed tires, down to where the looming, curling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway forms a steel curtain severing what used to be Red Hook. South, the Gowanus Canal is a wasteland of buried or sunk toxins and smoldering strips of rubber, while Ulano, the solvent factory, is a block-long engine, its windows like slit eyes, pumping out fresh invisible toxins and accompanying legends of nerve damage and brain tumors. The projects, Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses—well, they’re projects, their own law, like meteors of crime landed in the city’s midst, still unapproachably hot. The jail’s called a House of Detention, a thin euphemism nonetheless worth clinging to. So, the brownstone streets which span these margins—Wyckoff, Bergen, Dean, Pacific—a ghetto?

  Call it “The City’s Best-Kept Secret.”

  Nevins has unique properties, venting at the top to Flatbush Avenue and running south smack into the Wyckoff Gardens, on the way threading the halfway house, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Schermerhorn Park, and the Nevins Day Care Center, on the steps of which drunks gather to greet welfare moms as they pass in and out of the center, yanking bawling kids’ arms like yo-yo strings. And widely known but rarely spoken of is this: Pacific Street at Nevins is a place where prostitution’s tolerated. Some default in authority has chased it to this corner, where after eleven o’clock a lone streetwalker or sometimes a pair can be spotted in the shadow of Public School 38, heard cooing enticements to lone strollers on a quiet night. Outraged calls to local officials gain promises and nothing more. At that inexplicable level where such civic deals are struck this one’s irrevocable, even as the neighborhood on all sides is gentrifying fast. So the police are revealed as skeptics, insensible to the concerns of realtors. This zone’s on their official map—never displayed to the public—of Hopeless.

  So, perhaps it’s by this same principle that the no-longer-flying man has been allowed to rest undisturbed for weeks in his fetal curl on the corner of Nevins and Atlantic. He’s still there the last Saturday of March, when the black kid and the white kid go by. Yes, they’re together again, that uncanny sporadic pair, their solidarity a befuddlement to passersby, a shred perhaps of utopian symbolism, sure, something Norman Rockwell might have chosen as a subject, but not outweighing the fact that the two look furtive, maybe stoned, unmistakably headed for if not already deep into all kinds of black-white-combo trouble. Even those who don’t happen to spot them slipping blunt felt-tipped markers sopped with purple ink in and out of their jackets sense the likelihood that something’s not right. This is Brooklyn, nothing integrates innocently. Who’s fooling who? If the cops were on the ball they’d likely split up this pair just on general principles.

  The white kid and the black kid take turns playing lookout while the other tags up. Things are radically simplified: the white kid’s stopped looking for his own moniker, been encouraged by the black kid to throw up his perfect replication of the black kid’s tag instead. DOSE , DOSE , DOSE . It’s a happy solution for both. The black kid gets to see his tag spread farther, in search of bragging points for ubiquity, that bottom-line standard for a graffiti writer’s success. The King of the C Line, for instance, is just a lousy tagger with too much time on his hands who’s thrown up the unimaginative tag CE on every window of every car of the trains that run that line. A success of this type is as impossible to dispute as it is mechanical, crude. Graffiti writers compete like viruses, by raw proliferation.

  What’s in it for the white kid? Well, he’s been allowed to merge his identity in this way with the black kid’s, to lose his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom in the illusion that he and his friend Mingus Rude are both Dose, no more and no less. A team, a united front, a brand name, an idea. The white kid’s control of line, honed in a thousand Spirograph spirals, and his gift for mimicry—Can You Draw Tippy?—both have served him well. His rendition of the DOSE icon is clarified, perfected, automatic—in fact cleaner and more sure in its lines than the black kid’s. Just a trick of the hand, nothing anyone couldn’t learn if they practiced it a gazillion times waiting for this moment.

  The marker’s in the black kid’s hands now. The white kid’s the lookout. The black kid puts DOSE on the base of the traffic light at the corner of Atlantic and Nevins, and on the locked-up locksmith’s rolling metal gate. Then he turns and considers the curled figure near the curb. They both consider the figure. The bum—the word they’d find if they bothered to find a word—has been sleeping or dead on this corner for long enough now that they’ve both noticed him at different times. This is the first time together, though, and being together forces them to acknowledge the figure in a way they wouldn’t apart.

  The white kid has one set of feelings, the black kid another. The white kid’s seen this particular bum on better days, seen him in the sky, idiotic as that sounds. He’s got no idea whether his friend Mingus has this information, and no idea where he’d begin explaining it if he wanted to try. He’s just locked into a permanent state of stupid wonder here, along with a slug of fear.

  The black kid’s curling his lip, suffering a ripple of sudden shame: of course it’s a black guy who’d be lying here in the street, goes without saying. Not a Latin guy. No matter how many Hispanic drunkards might spill out of Dean Street’s rooming houses, they always wobble home, sleep in beds, change clothes, cash government checks, and begin again. And he’s no white guy, no need to even think about it.

  “Watch this,” said the black kid.

  “What?” says the white kid.

  The black kid dashes forward with splendid daring, taking the white kid’s breath away. He’s got the marker uncapped. The plasticky sleeping bag stretched across the bum’s back has a sheen despite the grime, a slickness to welcome the marker’s slide. The black kid kneels at the stinky form and tags up, managing
despite the drag of the felt on the blackened synthetic: in a moment the thing is done and they both spring away, amazed.

  The bum’s back reads DOSE .

  “Run!”

  “He’s not moving. Ho, shit! Look at that!”

  “Come on!”

  That’s it, they’re done tagging for the day, nothing could top this anyway. The two of them scramble down Nevins, gasping with laughter, drunk on the atrocious prank, on the demonstration of their dangerous new ability to reach out and plop a logo on the maybe-dead of this world.

  They arrived late and had to take single seats a distance apart. Dylan sat near the front, in the second row. His father had insisted Dylan take the nearer seat, had himself taken one farther back and at the far left side of the lecture hall. Dylan understood he was meant to appreciate this up-close glimpse of the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, whom Abraham regarded soberly as a great man, a beautiful man. The topic, generally, was paint on film. Dylan hadn’t known before this moment that painted film existed, apart from Abraham’s. Let alone that the topic could draw a crowd to fill a hall full of uncomfortable metal folding chairs.

  In fact, Dylan found Brakhage, when he spoke, enthralling, though he understood zip of what he said. Brakhage was charismatic and orotund and evoked Orson Welles on television. Like Welles he suggested a greatness both distant from itself and fully at rest, in this case scarcely bothering to taste the air of adulation in the room. The problem with the presentation was that Brakhage rarely spoke. He sat sipping water and blinking rapidly, examining the audience, remaining largely silent in favor of a panel of younger men who in laborious turns pronounced on the significance of Brakhage’s films. Their spiky, resentful tones failed at concealing (or were perhaps not designed to conceal) the implication that they alone understood the filmmaker’s work. Dylan was bored, as Rachel would have said, shitless.

  “I would rather see my work as an attempt to clear aesthetic areas, to free film from previous arts and ideologies,” said Brakhage when he was permitted. His words rippled through the room, resonating in minds so straining toward their speaker that they practically boiled. Dylan felt it himself. He looked back at his father, who sat straining too, in love and anger toward the stage. “Perhaps to leave it clear to be of use to men and women of various kinds which might help evolve human sensibility.”

  The fluorescent-lit, plaster-crumbled lecture hall in the Cooper Union basement was full to capacity now, to standing room only. Dylan twitched, but he wasn’t alone. The man in the seat beside him was tearing a Styrofoam cup into a thousand dandrufflike shreds which floated down to form a drift between his tapping feet. The Styrofoam-tearing man might have been in an agony of suppressing some question he wanted to cry out to the men on the stage. Perhaps he thought he belonged on the stage. Everywhere chairs creaked.

  “I believe in song,” said Brakhage. “That’s what I want to do and I do it quite selfishly, out of my own need to come through to a voice that is comparable with song and related to all animal life on earth. I am moved at the whole range of songs that the wolf makes to the moon, or neighborhood dogs make, and I in great humility wish to join this.”

  When the tension in the room was at its height and the Styrofoam cup had been wholly processed the shredder beside Dylan jumped up and shouted into the panel’s droning, “What about Oskar Fischinger? None of you are acknowledging Fischinger!”

  Having thrown this gauntlet he stood trembling, perhaps expecting to find the crowd at his back, enraged, ready to rush the dais.

  “I don’t think anyone’s denying Fischinger,” said one of the men on the panel, in a tone of draining sarcasm. “I don’t think that’s really the point at all.”

  “Never mind Fischinger,” came another voice. It was Abraham Ebdus. He spoke from the corner of the room without rising from his chair, and more quietly than the shredder, who still stood. “Maybe at this point someone should mention Walther Ruttman.”

  Silence on the podium, marked only by Brakhage’s slight and unsurprised nod, which seemed to say, Ruttman, yes, Ruttman. The shredder took his seat, humbled.

  Then, from the back of the hall another cry pierced the breath-inheld tension: “Fuck Ruttman! What about Disney ?”

  This brought a roar of relief, since no one actually relished the burden of understanding how little they knew of the careers of Fischinger and Ruttman. The moment was now lost in a calamity of babble and laughter. Then Brakhage smoothed everything, began taking questions from the crowd. Hostility slowly dissipated as the panelists were rendered equal to the audience by Brakhage’s authority. Silent, the younger men could be more-or-less forgiven for being onstage.

  Forgiven perhaps by all but Abraham.

  Afterward Brakhage was mobbed at the foot of the stage. Abraham found Dylan in the swirling mass of bodies, took his hand, and together they pushed to the exit. Dylan felt his father’s smoldering inarticulate fury, felt enclosed in it as in a cocoon as they descended the subway stairwell at Astor Place and as they waited on the platform, then boarded the 6 train, felt it shut them out against the other night riders, whose heads lolled with the train’s movements on the weary sticks of their bodies, felt it shut them against the whole city everywhere around them.

  Dylan breathed his father’s embarrassment. Something had gone wrong in Abraham’s demonstration to his son of Brakhage’s greatness, and of his, Abraham’s, kinship with the great filmmaker, this man who was Abraham’s secret tutor, his North Star. Perhaps the hall had been too full. Perhaps it would have been too full if there had been even one other soul there apart from Brakhage and Abraham Ebdus and his son. The evening was essentially ruined as soon as it was obvious Brakhage wasn’t only not as lonely for recognition as Ebdus but wasn’t lonely for recognition in the least.

  Or maybe it was just that asshole shouting Disney for an easy laugh.

  The mood lasted as they waited at Brooklyn Bridge for the 4 train, that extra indignity of the 6’s refusal to bother entering Brooklyn, lasted as they emerged at Nevins to walk in silence toward Dean Street, toward their beds, oblivion for their demolished evening. It might have gotten them home, Abraham’s bubble of muted rage, if it hadn’t been for the tagged bum still in his self-clench on the corner of Atlantic.

  Dylan glanced as they passed. The once-flying man’s mummified pose was unchanged, though he seemed nearer to the gutter now. DOSE gleamed on the billboard of his back, spotlit by the streetlamp.

  Abraham Ebdus raised his eyes from his dark contemplation of the pavement at his feet and followed Dylan’s gaze to the bum’s back. He halted in his steps.

  “What’s that?”

  “What?” blurted Dylan.

  “That.” Abraham pointed, unmistakably, horribly, at the spotlit DOSE on the bum’s sleeping bag.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dylan, hopelessly.

  “You do,” said Abraham. “You write it on your notebook.” Certainty rose in Abraham’s voice, his fog of anger given shape. “I’ve seen it. That’s the word you and Mingus write on everything. You think I don’t notice ? You think I’m stupid ?”

  Dylan couldn’t speak.

  “Let me see your sneakers.”

  Abraham Ebdus took Dylan’s shoulder, his hand clawlike, a startling assertion of force between them. Abraham’s disapproval or affection were usually aspects of a floating arrangement of father-notions, largely sonic: footsteps pacing overhead, a voice descending stairs. Abraham was a collection of sounds bound in human form by gloom.

  Now they stood in the cool night on the corner of Atlantic Avenue, connected by Abraham’s grip. The streetlamp’s nimbus on the shape at their feet, a stinky outcropping of the gutter ignored for weeks and improbably come to human attention at last. Abraham turned Dylan by the shoulder and squinted to examine his son’s sneakers like evidence in a murder.

  Eyes behind passing windshields could care less.

  A
block away, a whore paced to the corner of Pacific. She called to some old man walking a dog, no illusions, just out of boredom.

  Spring was coming, though, a general thaw, she could feel it.

  “What’s that?” Abraham said, his grip fierce. “It’s the same, isn’t it?”

  There was no way to hide. The fat white margin at the sole of each of Dylan’s Pro Keds was crammed with miniature tags. The mushy rubber took a blue ballpoint like butter under pressure of a fork’s tine, a discovery which had enraptured Dylan’s attention during a crushingly dull math class. Though technically he was destroying his prize 69ers, Dylan couldn’t stop himself. At least it rendered them not worth stealing.

  “Mingus wrote it,” Dylan heard himself say.

  Abraham freed Dylan’s shoulder and they sprang apart, a physical renouncing as sharp as the contact itself.

  “Look at us!” Abraham said, squeezing his eyes and forehead with one hand. It wasn’t clear that he was speaking to Dylan.

  Dylan waited frozen.

  “What could this possibly mean?” said Abraham, his voice erupting from him now. “Is this what I raised you for? This disrespect for a human life? What do you and Mingus do out on the streets, Dylan? Just run like feral animals? Who taught you this?”

  “I didn’t—” But Dylan couldn’t offer Mingus’s name again.

  “Maybe this is just a terrible place. Maybe in these streets right and wrong are confused, so you and your friends run insane like animals that would do this to a human person.” Rachel went omitted, unnamed, but both knew that to speak of this place was to speak of her, however little they wished to. Possibly Dylan and Abraham only remained in Gowanus for Rachel, holding down her spot. Now they’d tiptoed together to the brink of an implication that Rachel had outlawed. Some shadow lurked in the word animals that shamed Abraham deeply.

  “It’s this time in the world,” said Abraham, groping for some epic sentiment to blur the thought that had come over them both. “We’re in hell, that’s the only explanation.” The body on the street with DOSE on his back could be ascribed to Gerald Ford or Abe Beame, perhaps the Shah of Iran.