The Fortress of Solitude

by Jonathan Lethem

  White boy was some kind of catching machine today.

  You were flying.

  ’Cuz I was too nerv-uh-us, to really get down —

  Arthur Lomb kicked a grounder down the street sideways and they all stood head-lolled watching him corral it.

  “Yo, Mingus,” said Lonnie, falsely breezy. “I seen all of the Funk Mob visited your pops the other day.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mingus deadpanned.

  “You must of seen it, Mingus, man. They had a big white limo all in the street. They looked like superheroes, man.”

  “What drug you on, Lon?”

  “Don’t say you don’t know what he’s talkin’ about,” said Marilla.

  Dylan had heard Earl and a couple of kids mention it the day before—the limousine, the wild-costumed musicians that had poured out of it.

  “I saw nothing,” said Mingus, increasingly pleased with himself, thriving on the absurdity of denying it.

  “That boy’s lying,” said La-La, shaking her head.

  Mingus reared, the spaldeen shot into the sky. A dark smudge wobbled to describe the pink ball’s torque against the background of sun-stained leaves.

  “Take that !” taunted Mingus.

  Dylan flew and found it in his hand again.

  The ring and the ball in some kind of partnership of magical objects.

  You between them: the beneficiary, airborne.

  “Dang! My man can jump !”

  Dylan flipped the ball back past gapes of astonishment in the street.

  “Watch your boy D-Lone, King Arthur man. Learn a thing.”

  “I’m taking notes,” said Arthur Lomb sourly.

  Marilla flopped her head and rolled her eyes, resumed singing, syllables stretched in petulance, But my bod-dee-ee, yearned to be—freee —

  By the time Robert Woolfolk arrived Dylan had robbed nine of Mingus’s sure home runs, was perhaps assembling a legend, some kind of miraculous stand patrolling the far sidewalk, the air above. The game had become nominal, just an elaborate contest of wills between the stoned Mingus, the flying Dylan. The others were stranded, monkeys-in-the-middle, feeding off scraps.

  Marilla and La-La chose not to note Robert Woolfolk’s saunter past their place on the stoop, his bid for their eyes. Robert couldn’t bring Dean Street crumbling to attention just rounding the corner anymore, that’s what their taunting voices claimed. I got up on the flo-oo-or board, somebody can—choose—me —

  Inspired, street-flippant, Dylan decided not to fear Robert Woolfolk today, not on his own block, not wearing Aaron Doily’s ring. Besides, Arthur Lomb was here, official weakest link. You could practically feel Robert measuring Arthur’s neck for a yoke, like Wile E. Coyote replacing the Roadrunner with a roast chicken in his mind’s eye.

  It seemed to Dylan now that Robert Woolfolk’s argument was with Rachel. Who was gone from their lives, even if Robert Woolfolk hadn’t grasped it. That wasn’t Dylan’s problem. There were days he hardly thought of Rachel once.

  Today, for one.

  “Yo, Gus, man, let me see the ball for a minute,” said Robert. He tilted his head, moved his eyes sideways, checking his back. “I’ll give it back, man, you know I will.” Another kid could ask to join a ball game: Robert Woolfolk had to hustle in. His basic premise was criminal. It wasn’t something he could leave behind when it happened to be unnecessary.

  Mingus cocked his head, stared at Robert Woolfolk like Robert was speaking Martian. The younger kids wandered off, half-intimidated, half-bored, never touching the ball. Arthur Lomb frowned at Dylan, his trademark glare-of-despair. He might be calling up an asthma attack any minute now.

  “Aight,” said Mingus suddenly, and bounced the spaldeen to Robert Woolfolk, home run forgotten, stakes evaporated. Mingus could do that, flip like a switch. “You can find me in the outfield,” he announced. “Me and my man Dee.”

  Dylan shifted to his left and Mingus joined him, two center fielders in rivalry for anything in the air. Robert’s first throw, slung underhand, knuckles nearly grazing pavement, produced a line drive at eye level which banked off the car between infield and outfield, nearly taking Arthur Lomb’s head off coming and going. Robert Woolfolk remained a source of bizarre ricochets, like a busted pinball machine left for years in the arcade and still eating your quarters.

  “My mother said I have to go home, Dylan,” said Arthur Lomb glumly. The non sequitur betrayed his discomfort. Who’d said anything about mothers ?

  “Okay,” said Dylan, uninterested.

  “All right then, I’ve got to go.” Arthur seemed to think Dylan ought to walk him home, or at least break off playing to acknowledge the fact of his departure.

  “See ya.”

  “Hey, King Arthur,” said Mingus, picking up the thread. “Catch you on the rebound.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Give my regards to Pacific Street, man—and your mother.”

  Alberto and Robert Woolfolk busted an instantaneous gut. Mingus and Dylan deadpanned, pretended nothing was unusual. It was hilarious in a way you couldn’t pin down, Mingus essentially saying yo mama without saying it.

  Mutual assured deniability.

  Arthur Lomb just slumped and moved down the block, a crushed pawn.

  And Marilla sang No more stand-di-ing beside the wall —

  Robert wound and unwound himself again and the ball struck high on the stoop and flew the farthest yet.

  Albert leaned on a car, not imagining for a moment this was his to catch. He turned to watch Dylan and Mingus jostle elbows together, preparing to leap.

  I done got myself togeth-a, baby —

  As he rose, Dylan saw the block complete. He nestled easily in the air, under the branches, above the cars. He was aware of Mingus beside him, rising not quite so high. The pink ball found Dylan’s left hand, his catching hand, ring hand, met palm of its own volition. Dylan simply there to keep the appointment. He had time to glance around, Marilla’s song slowed, to, geth, a, ba, by, from above Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk had what couldn’t actually be a bald spot, but a bare place, an off-center patch of scuff or mange on the top of his head. The ball compressed in Dylan’s palm as if sighing. At the corner of Dylan’s vision Arthur Lomb sagged home along the slate. The boy can’t catch, ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. Dylan noticed La-La’s nice tits, was amazed he had the term nice tits ready the first time he’d noticed any. In truth he probably owed it to Arthur Lomb, the availability of that concept, not that he’d ever give Arthur the credit. So who needed the Solver girls, anyway? Maybe your life wasn’t bereft, your fortune robbed before it could be spent. Maybe life, sex, everything that mattered, was right here, on Dean, not gone elsewhere. At his side, Dylan felt Mingus Rude nestled slightly below him, their bodies clunking sweetly as Mingus tried to match Dylan’s leap and fell short, minus the advantage of the flying man’s ring. Mingus rising not quite so high as Dylan.

  At perihelion Dylan felt himself to be a note of music, one delayed, now floating upward. They might all be notes in a song, the Dean Street kids. Mingus was Dose. Though Dylan had been tagging the name it belonged to Mingus wholly. Mingus had his drug thing, his access to Barrett’s stash, and it was okay, it was cool. Robert Woolfolk, his part was to be skulky and scary. Robert was criminal-minded, Dylan couldn’t begrudge it. You allowed for the kid from the projects, steered a berth. Arthur Lomb, he was the white boy, slotted into place. Even Arthur was okay, he just didn’t know it yet.

  As for Dylan, he had the ring. Befuddled witnesses were only part wrong, Dean Street possessed superheroes: not musicians in a limousine but Dylan, the flying kid. He’d sew a costume and take to the rooftops, begin bounding down on crime and they’d know then what they couldn’t be allowed to know yet. Today it had to be disguised: the Discovery of Flight, right under their noses. On his maiden bound, though, he already felt love and sympathy for all as he swam in the air, his view rearranged.

  Then Marilla c
ompleted the line, hands waving for syncopation, the beat only she heard, I done got myself togeth-a, baby—now I’m havin’ a ball! Dylan landed, Keds squeaking softly, a millisecond after Mingus, though they’d jumped in tandem. The ball in Dylan’s cool palm. Elsewhere sweat had broken everywhere on his thrilled body while aloft.

  “Kangaroo boy!” barked Mingus. “Been takin’ his vitamins, dang!”

  La-La answered Marilla’s falsetto call with a jeering response:

  Got to give it up, baby!

  Oh, yeah: Got to give it up!

  It would be the throwdown of the summer of ’77 though it was still just the start of July: Grandmaster DJ Flowers is coming with his crew from Flatbush to spin discs in the schoolyard of P.S. 38 after the block party on Bergen. Word’s gone out. Hottest day of summer so far only nobody complains, nobody’s tired, the sun plummets on Manhattan and the harbor, making orange light, but the day hadn’t started yet, not if you knew what was about to go down. You couldn’t drink enough beer to cool off or get sleepy. The block party itself is just preliminary, the white renovators grilling chops in their front yards, trying to get to know their neighbors, couple of Spanish guys playing steel drums, nothing special. The little kids run wild, girl and boy, Spanish, black and white mixed the way they did at that age. They spend themselves in the sun, winning and losing shitty prizes, Super Balls, green-haired gremlins, sucking sweet juice through shaved ice in paper cones, getting face-painted by a clown who’s really somebody’s mom roasting in a Day-Glo Afro wig. The young ones shriek and run, are pooped and whining by four o’clock. The older kids are stalling for night. They kill the afternoon stoop-sitting, eyeing that balloon-filler’s huge canister of helium, eating dollar-fifty plates of paella.

  By six o’clock the first kids have begun to group in 38’s yard, though Flowers won’t show until nightfall. The local crews are here in the meantime, setting up a minor skirmish to whet the appetite. P.S. 38 is the domain of the Flamboyan Crew, since their celebrated DJ Stone operates out of the basement of the Colony South Brooklyn youth center next door. Indeed, it was Flamboyan Crew’s invitation to Flowers which resulted in tonight’s plans. That doesn’t mean nobody disputes Flamboyan’s primacy here, though. Geography dictates the 38 schoolyard’s really a nexus between different forces, the Atlantic Terminals kids crossing down from Fort Greene, the Wyckoff Houses element coming up Nevins. Plus the tough Sarah J. Hale High School kids, drawn to the neighboring block of Pacific from all over.

  So, up from Red Hook are the Disco Enforcers—they’ve heard about Flowers’s visit and demanded a turn in the proceedings. Flamboyan’s found itself backed into a battle of the jams when all they’d intended was to host Flowers with themselves as the warm-up. No sweat, though, Stone’s up to it. He’s so sharp on the crossfader he might be Brooklyn’s king if not for Flowers. The rival crews work together to set up, to steal juice out of the nearest streetlight base and run it down to the far end of the yard for their turntables and amps. At the same time trying to conceal from one another their crates of twelve-inches, thinking to maintain some edge of surprise. The secrecy’s a bit of a joke, though: they’re all, including Flowers when he gets there, certain to be spinning the same fifteen or twenty cuts.

  The Enforcers go first. They’re an all-black crew, Enforcers compensating easily for any faggy associations in the first part of their name. Similarly, their partisans dance on roller skates— uprocking, that’s what they call it—and nobody’s laughing. They balance kneebends and one-heel spins against a series of crotch-grabbing and fist-clenched poses, an in-your-face aspect. One mimes feeding you an endless firehose of dick. The Red Hook DJ leans on “Fatbackin” by the Fatback Band and Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican” but also stumps the crowd with Alvin Cash and the Registers’ “Stone Thing (Part 1),” an unfamiliar jam. On the drum breaks the line of roller-skated dancers freaks for the crowd, a storm of limbs, skates striking sparks on the cement.

  If you managed to meet the eyes of the dancers, though, you’d find them flinching, shy. To actually get out there and uprock isn’t easy. Far easier to stand pouting with arms crossed, head perhaps bobbing slightly as you stake out your chosen proximity and consider what unfolds.

  The beat’s a sonic clatter resounding down Pacific, down Nevins and Third Avenue, a clarion to any who might have missed word: Something’s happening up at thirty-eights, yo.

  Flamboyan takes over next. Those who recalled anything beyond Flowers’s appearance that night would later grant DJ Stone blew the Disco Enforcers out the yard. Stone not only finds the break, he wears it out. Plus, where the Enforcers’ DJs provided their own exhortations to the crowd—a scant few Evveybody git down! ’s—Stone’s got a boy on a vocal mic calling out to the crowd, one who must imagine he’s Flowers’s kid brother. The scrawny boy, who calls himself MC Ruff, just won’t quit with the chants and rhymes.

  Flamboyan Crew doesn’t provide its own dancers—Stone’s breaks and Ruff’s shouts merely turn the whole yard into Soul Train. No big surprises, just “Paradise Is Very Nice” and “Love Is the Message” sliced a hundred different ways. Those are the grooves get people off the wall. “Love Is the Message” in particular. It’s by MFSB, house band of the Philly Groove. Their name ostensibly stands for “Mother, Father, Sister, Brother,” though those hip know it really means “Motherfuckin’ Sons of Bitches.” No DJ is without three or four copies of the precious twelve-inch, it’s the staple of any set and nobody complains.

  Two hours later they hear “Love Is the Message” again from Flowers. In his hands it sounds just as good, better. Flowers in person casts a spell, he’s some kind of heavy Jamaican or West Indian dude, beyond affiliation or strife, like Kung Fu. Flowers is one of the discoverers— the isolators —of the break, one of those who proved how furiously people could be made to dance to a section of song unencumbered by vocals or melody. And proving it again tonight.

  By this time the card tables and crepe paper back on Bergen have long been cleared. Here is the only place you’d want to be. Maybe three hundred kids spilled around the turntables and amps, dancers at the front, hard-asses clustered according to faction: Atlantic Terminals, Wyckoff Gardens, Spanish dudes from Fifth Avenue. Nobody wants to be the fool who starts a ruckus, though pride requires vigilance against anyone gazing too long at you or your lady. Rivals form Apache lines and dance their aggression, throwing moves. Sure, there’s a scuffle or two. But this gathering’s peaceful, hardly calls for the cops to come shutting it down just before midnight, stripping one group of kids of sock-hidden steak knives, one cop snapping a pair of nunchucks over his knees, everyone sent streaming out of the schoolyard still buzzing, barely gotten started.

  Nevertheless, Flowers’s set runs long enough to carve the night into legend. The Jam of ’77, just before the blackout. The dark yard lit by the glow of the DJ’s flashlights as they cued up grooves, ran breaks together: it merges in memory with that night of flares and candles a week later. In memory, that is, of all but the white kid, the one white face in the whole yard, brought there by, and hewing close to the side of, his homeboy Dose. No blackout for whiteboy. He’s lost his last chess game, eaten his last of Mrs. Lomb’s turkey sandwiches, tomorrow he’s boarding a Greyhound for Vermont. The Fresh Air kid.

  Dylan’s gone unhassled tonight. Who knows why unless it’s evidence of the jam’s benignity. He’s stood all night soaking it up, one in the mob of flickering bodies and animated faces, even shouting out Ho-o! and Ow! when Flowers called for it, though this does garner stern looks from some bruthas standing nearby. Still, he skates through. Maybe this night’s just lucky, maybe he’s passed through some flame and come out the other side. Maybe it’s the ring. Maybe the ring has made him invisible. Maybe the ring has made him black. Who can say?

  A black-and-white photograph of Fidel Castro in a baseball uniform, standing on a pitcher’s mound:

  if the mets had to trade seaver

  for a red

  they should have shi
pped him

  to cuba for this guy

  better fit for che stadium

  so saith commissioner crab

  The postcard slipped from between the gallery flyers and Chinese takeout menus stuffed through the mail slot and landed on the hallway carpet, message side up. Abraham Ebdus didn’t raise an eyebrow, only dropped it onto the small pile accumulating on the parlor’s side table. He trusted there was no urgency to the Running Crab postcards by this point, nothing in any way timely. The boy could wait to read them when he returned. Abraham himself never even glanced at the things anymore.

  chapter 11

  Fish mouthed the pond’s surface, seeming to sip air. Mist clung to the long grass curling from the banks and in the tops of the trees beyond the grass. The short, rotten dock where the boy from the city sat floated inside a gray-green smear, like a corroded photograph of a cloud. Easier to see through the pond’s lens to the baublelike sunfish and the broccoli-bright fronds growing underwater than through air to the opposite bank.

  “Fish in the rain,” Buzz, the delinquent teenage son of the city kid’s host family, the Windles, had said that morning. “I’ll set you up. You can’t miss.” Buzz had begun sloughing off the boy from the city with bogus rural assignments, stuff he likely wouldn’t touch himself if you paid him. Buzz at sixteen had a small mustache and was hot to rejoin his Vietnam-vet pals chain-smoking over the open hood of a theoretically souped-up, in truth inert, Mustang. The city kid had trailed along for an afternoon and an evening before Buzz cut him loose. In an oil-stained, weedy driveway Buzz’s grown friends flicked glowing butts at a lame golden retriever, urinated into empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and joked in a language the boy from the city couldn’t understand.

  It was only malicious to wrench fish through that lens to drown on mushy planks. The boy had no interest in reenacting Buzz’s hasty demonstration. The pole rested in the curved grass at the dock’s base, hidden like a comb in hair. The boy hunched in borrowed yellow slicker, back turned from the path up to the fields behind the house, painting a figure of solitude for anyone approaching, for his own mental eye: Brooklyn-bereft in Vermont, 1977.